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Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 21:20
by apienk
Hi, is it doable in Minetest? Could the sun follow a more realistic path across the sky, e.g. rise in the NE, move to 60-70 degrees of elevation at noon, and set in the NW (like during north hemisphere mid latitude summer)?

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 22:16
by sorcerykid
Perhaps by extension (and to resolve one of my ongoing pet peeves), there is a chance to reconcile the motion of the moon as well?

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Wed Mar 01, 2017 23:05
by twoelk
hm, sometime in April 2014

Things I wish were configurable (my wishlist ;-P , from the Textureable sun and moon Thread)
  • Size of object in the sky
  • Keeping the descriptive original file name
  • setting of a rising time

  • More than one object (satellites and natural satellites)
  • setting offset from default path for each satelite (parallel paths)

  • making the orbit time of each satellite independant from the star background (making eclipses possible)
  • making individual orbit paths independant from the default star background direction (east to west)


and on github: Manipulating/setting the position of the sun/moon from the Lua API. #1997

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 01:53
by TumeniNodes
Robert Zenz had a lot of cool ideas and some cool work
but (just an opinion) he frustrated far too easily and quit to quickly : /

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 22:17
by paramat
It's doable, but i feel low priority. MT cosmology is highly unrealistic already, with a cubic planet rotating between Sun and Moon which are always opposite from each other. Making things cosmologically realistic would need a lot of new code and i don't see much need, MT is highly unrealistic to keep it simple.

However i do like the idea of being able to add more cosmic bodies, so the sky can be altered for alien worlds, but this can be done without altering the path in the sky. So i'm saying, let's add really useful features but do them in a simple way.

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 00:06
by TumeniNodes
You know, it's funny... I had not even realized the paths are not realistically accurate....
: / ... I need to get outside more...

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 01:39
by twoelk
I don't want more realism .... just more action in the sky :-D

indeed I didn't have a realistic sky in mind but rather the possability to do some awesome science fiction or fantasy stuff that might include large celestial objects on different paths and some nice eclipses that might trigger some magical mumbojumbo.

Re: Astronomical sun path

PostPosted: Fri Mar 03, 2017 02:21
by TumeniNodes
twoelk wrote:I don't want more realism .... just more action in the sky :-D

indeed I didn't have a realistic sky in mind but rather the possability to do some awesome science fiction or fantasy stuff that might include large celestial objects on different paths and some nice eclipses that might trigger some magical mumbojumbo.


too bad we cannot use an animated sky texture..... It would be very cool to be able to set a gif or short mpeg4 file to play as a skybox, or something