p2pnet.net News:- The Net – Cyber Space – is a world within a world, a virtual reality within our physical reality.

Now, the Druantia project, “still a little baby in need of developers,” aims to allow anyone with decent graphic card and broadband internet connection to explore Mars and interact with other participants, writes Jaroslaw Zachwieja in a /.post.

Data served are the highest publicly available set with one pixel for approx. 460 meters and (uncompressed) takes 2GB of disk space, he says.

“Meet you at Olympus Mons? ”

And make sure you check out the amazing Mars avi (5MB, divx, 640×480, 500 frames, 15fps) with simulated water level. It’s on the site, or here – just in case.

The elevation is exagerated by factor of 1.5, say the creators, going on:

“Rendering utilised 16bit MOLA data (064 dataset) and our modified colour data. Povray 3.6 was used. The sphere is isosurface modified by MOLA data. The water sphere is scaled 0.998 on the Y axis. Total memory needed to render one frame was 2.8GB (Opteron based systems were used to render).”

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Druantia is an attempt to create a full resolution, realtime and client-server based 3D virtual trip to Mars, Licensed under GNU GPL, says the web page.

“The project is still in early infancy, however the important materials like datasets have already been acquired and pre-processed.

“Also, number of algorithms was chosen to base the visualisation on and OpenSceneGraph was agreed to be the visualisation engine.

“The main project goal is to create a 1:1 scale (in terms of both size and resolution) working model of an entire planet. With server-side global events management and client-side local events management. Please understand, that this is NOT yet another MMORPG game, and the world we’re talking about needs to be as close to original as possible. This means no “zone loading”, no “teleportation”, and no other nasty tricks . We have to work in 64bit resolution XYZ world where every vertex of the terrain is shell mapped on a sphere that has radius of 3396 km. It will require vast amounts of computing resources and insane amounts of data storage. We do have the infrastructure in place.

“We also have a set of climate modelling algorithms available that will be used on a dedicated 4-way server to simulate climate on a planetary scale. The goal is to be as scientificaly accurate as possible. This would include climate modeling and possibly research on terraforming later.

“Druantia needs YOUR help!

“If you’re C++ programmer and have good knowledge of GNU/Linux, please join our project. We heavily depend on the tasks mechanism provided by SF. Therefore please check out the current tasks if you would like to participate.”

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See:-
Meet you at Olympus Mons – Go on a Virtual Trip to Mars, slashdot, November 6, 2004
Druantia project – druantia.main, November 6, 2004

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 6th, 2004 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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