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Contains the full Hipparcos database of 118 218 stars - plus optional database of 2 million more stars - in true 3D! Several star rendering modes: From simple points to Saturated Gauss bells with diffraction crosses. Visible extent when you get close enough to a star. Optional visual effects such as lens flares and camera burn-out. Double-click on a star to travel to it! |
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View a large selection of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae drawn from a variety of catalogues. Note: These are not stored in 3D in the database so you can only view them 'from far away' - you can't travel to or go inside them. The exceptions are a few nearby nebulae, such as the Orion nebula, which you can pay a closer visit. |
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 Visit all of the 9 planets of our solar system. Or tour the 30 major satellites included with the program. The program contains highly detailed planet surface maps, as well as special maps for specular high lights, bumpiness, and cloud layers. |
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Includes a comprehensive database of common names for stars, constellations, galaxies, nebulae and planet surface features (all are of course searcheable!). You can right click on any object to view more extensive catalogue information on it, including educative notes for some selected objects (it also is possible to add your own notes with a little work...). |
This wizard makes it easy to find objects!
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  Optionally use 'anaglyph 3D-glasses' for stereo 3D!
Both 'normal' and 'colour' anaglyphs are supported. Above is one in 'red-cyan colour'. |
More features:
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Includes several educational as well as entertaining and beautiful tutorials. |
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Optional relativistic aberration and Doppler-shift effects - travel in a true Einsteinean universe rather than in a Newtonian one. |
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Use any DirectInput supported controller (joysticks, mice et c) for steering your star-ship - fully configurable controls! |
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Scripting engine and StarLua extension language - with a little work it's possible to create your own demonstrations and presentations just like the included tutorials. With a litte more work you can make very advanced extension to the program! |
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A scientifically accurate planetarium - made by an astronomer and a software engineer - both with a background in physics! |
| Highly realistic rendering is possible - Compare with a real photograph. |
| More screen-shots! |
Support for the latest hardware:
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StarStrider can run quite well on a wide range of hardware (minimum is a Pentium III or AMD Athlon or later plus a video card with hardware 3D support).
But if you have the latest and coolest hardware then it will take advantage of it and work
even better! E.g. giving you super-smooth frame rates in hi-res video modes - with all options turned on! |
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Support for Pixel & Vertex Shader 2.0 (or later): If your hardware supports this then the "multi-pass rendering" of planets and of saturated stars are not only replaced with much faster single pass "shader programs" - but it also adds per-pixel lighting, plus bump-mapping support, and improved rendering quality (all calculations are then done in floating point until the pixel is output, avoiding the accumulation of quantization errors that occurs with multiple rendering passes). |
| Our pixel shader for rendering Earth comes very close to the maximum instruction limit for the Pixel Shader 2.0 specification. It calculates per-pixel lighting with ambient light, two directional lights (the Moon and the Sun!), a specular light map (sparkling reflections in the oceans!), physically correct bump mapping (true rotation of the surface normal based on a height map for shadowed and sunlit mountain sides), a separate city light map for the night side, ray-traced cloud shadows, a moving cloud layer, and finally atmospheric haze effects. This in a single rendering pass - replacing up to seven rendering passes on older hardware! |
| Support for Hyper-threading and dual-CPU systems: When enabled, star retrieval and projection from the database will run in parallel with other tasks. |
| Highly optimized code ideal for long pipe-line processors such as the Pentium IV. |
| Star and deep-sky object databases comes in a highly optimized format that works equally well however you move around in space. Also optimized for best memory-cache performance. |