Now that
we are having texture updates for the Solar System I would like to remind about an old discussion we had on the possibility to extend the level of detail further and further. If I recall correctly SpaceEngineer thought of a solution, similar to that of Google Earth, involving the centralized storage of extreme resolution textures in a server and the ability to download them from it interactively and in real time. As the user points the camera to different parts of a planetary body the program would send queries to those servers and load the required portions of the surface. This would in principle allow for huge improvements in the user's experience.
I've just found an open-soruce software that does just that. It is called
OpenSpace, and as you can see here it has this kind of aproach for Earth, Mars and many other objects
[youtube]VPIvZMqEbBk[/youtube]
[youtube]NWZAg6qpMlE[/youtube]
For Earth and the Moon they have also solved a problem associated with the representation on programs like Google Earth: where satellite and aerial imagery looks patchy at best with different light conditions, colors associated with different seasonal conditions and different quality of the image, all added side by side. In the Mars video you can see this problem. It looks weird from far distances. But they seem to have solved this quite well for Earth as I said, their textures are very nice and continuous.
Since the project is open-source (
here is the code) I was wondering if this could be implemented easily on SE. Having LRO and MRO resolution textures for the Moon and Mars would be a great feature in the future.