Cool. Glad I could help.

They're still missing a few "historical" ones, though.

First link in the planets category is broken (HTML syntax error, it seems. But I still can't connect to the site manually, either)

Quote: Original post by Flarelocke
First link in the planets category is broken (HTML syntax error, it seems. But I still can't connect to the site manually, either)

Fixed

These Flaming Pear photoshop plugins are must-haves:

LunarCell - Generates amazing planet maps.

Glitterato - Does pretty decent starry backgrounds.

something concerning Star Trek...

one thing I never understood about Star Trek is the 'USS' in front of every ship's name.
so.... what does it stand for ? United States Ship maybe? yeeeessssss, of course. Why not painting an US Flag on every ship?

Why not 'FS' or just 'SS'?

Quote: Original post by Ajare
These Flaming Pear photoshop plugins are must-haves:

LunarCell - Generates amazing planet maps.

Glitterato - Does pretty decent starry backgrounds.

Awesome link. I just finished coding up my planet shaders & D3D code. Perfect timing for this link! I've been looking for a good source for color maps for other planets.

Another link that I've been using for imagemaps of all the planets in our solar system is here.

http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/planets.html

The nice part is that he's broken down most planets into color map, specular map, bump map, and planetary rings (if present).

The Game Programming Wiki has the source code, graphics, and sound for a space-based action/adventure game called Galaxy. Might be useful to some people!

Also available is the source code for fleet-based spaceship combat, with good AI and aiming algorithms.


Ryan

For information on designing realistic rockets / space ships:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/

A bunch of realistic designs, information about engines, life support, even weapons and sidearms.

Thanks a lot...

This is very useful.

Here a one more link:

http://www.stuff.tv/news/past-and-future/gaming-greats/25-best-space-games-ever?page=0,0

I think SpaceEngine belongs in the "3D engines and software":

SpaceEngine - http://en.spaceengine.org/

Very well done IMO. Unfortunately it's Windows-only, and requires a very powerful CPU and GPU. You can explore the entire known universe it seems, complete with billions of galaxies, stars, planets, etc. with a combination of real and procedurally generated data.

Also, I'd like to plug my own project here (if that's okay) in case anyone finds it useful: It's not an astronomically correct simulation, but it's a 100% open-source 3D universe engine in WebGL/HTML5. It supports trillions of stars and procedurally generated (concurrent, so everything is seamless) planets. IT does not support: atmospheric scattering, galaxy visualization, nebulae, ground level detail like cities/forests -- however all of these are major goals I want to accomplish with Kosmos 2.0 (my next spare time project).

Kosmos - A 3D universe in your browser - https://github.com/judnich/Kosmos

A live demo is also hosted in Mozilla DemoStudio: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/kosmos

I post this here in case any of the code from Kosmos is helpful to others working on space-related 3D engines, as I solved a lot of misc. problems during its development that are common to large space game environments (128 bit coordinate systems, layered rendering due to zbuffer precision issues, planet terrain LOD, etc.) Kosmos doesn't have super high resolution planets though because it's targeted at laptops (not extremely powerful GPUs), but I'm working on a more efficient engine in C/C++/OpenGL in my spare time that hopefully should allow cities, forests, etc. for ground level detail. (I found WebGL/JavaScript to be too performance limiting, though still impressive how far browsers have progressed so far.)