Now that Zack has made it possible to create 3D plasmoids I had to try writing one myself, too.It renders a virtual Earth model on your desktop, with subtle rotate animation and a day/night cycle, using NASA's Blue Marble imagery. And it has a rather crappy atmosphere as well.
It requires a shader-capable videocard to work, so minimum requirements are GeForce FX or Radeon 9500 although you'll
want to use a bit better card than those for any smoothness.It doesn't have any useful functionality, but if you just want to waste your processing power, then it does a pretty good job ;-)
The code can be found in KDE's SVN in playground/base/plasma/applets/bluemarble/.
4 comments:
Nice, but a complete desktop screen shot would be more revealing imho.
You could make it like a sunlight map where the user chooses the center and it will change the sunlight throughout the day or something like that...
Rest of the desktop is just plain Plasma background, nothing to show really :-)
I can't really spend much more time working on it atm, but if there's anyone else who'd like to implement any new features (e.g. clouds, config dialog, rotation/scaling, etc) I sure wouldn't mind ;-)
hi, couldn't it have been possible to use kde's marble project by Torsten Rhan?
nice work
No, I wanted to do something cool with OpenGL and Marble doesn't have OpenGL backend (yet).
Also Marble and my plasmoid have different aims - I don't expect my plasmoid to have much use besides being eyecandy.
Post a Comment