A 3D Solar System Visualisation written in Rust
This project is created with the following goals in mind
- Get a better understanding about Rust as a language. Aka: Learn Rust better.
- Learn more about the way Positioning is handled in Professional space applications.
- Create a tool to look at current and past missions, just for the fun of it.
- Talking about fun: FUN!
At some point there will be prebuilt binaries, but as of know, need to build this yourself.
- Clone the repository and its submodules.
git clone git@github.com:mkalte666/satwatch --recursive - optional: build it with cargo:
cargo build --release - Run it with cargo
cargo run --release
You will need a c and c++ compiler installed for some dependencies to build correctly.
The todo, until this gets close to something resembling a release,is rather big. This is not exhaustive, but for a "1.0" these are the features to go for
- SGP4 based TLE propagation
- UI and drawing improvements for the ui related to this
- NASA-SPICE in the build
- SPICE-Based Time
- SPICE-Based (using PDS Data) Planet positions
- Arbitrary spice objects
- An integrated downloader for NASA PDS Data
- Correct rotations of all planets (and maybe the sun, if its texture is good enough)
- Observation(aka passes) finder from
- Lat/Long/Altitude coordinates
- Planets are not spheres
- Textures for all panets and the sun
- Switch between the normal equator-based camera and one that has its plane on the ecliptic
- More consistent UI. Probably best tackled somewhere in between "nearly everything is prototyped" and "too late to fix the current state"
- Some sort of welcome-screen that takes care of the initial requred downloads (Planetary ephemeris and leap second kernel)
- UV-Mapped Textures for objects
- Some form of view-frustrum culling, maybe, if needed on weaker machines. I doubt it, needs testing.
- Orbit camera instead of the FPS one currently implemented. Would then probably play better with the euler singularities as well. Were not a spaceship :(
- Some cool screenshots for this readme
- CI builds
- Write a blog post or talk when this is finished, explaning the whole thing.
- Same as above, but for people touching the code: Documentation.