Solar Kingdom 1.5 - Overview

Solar Kingdom is a real-time, photo realistic, 3D Solar System Simulator for the Windows based PC. You can fly the camera to any point within the solar system and see the planets and moons in 24-bit eye-popping colour. Take a look at the sample images, these are all untouched. You can see planets rotate, moon orbit, even stars twinkle through Saturn's rings. Married to this 3D experience is the encyclopedia, a rich educational tool in which original text, high quality images and movies abound.

There is a demonstration version of Solar Kingdom which includes the Earth, Sun and Moon in the simulator and encyclopedia. The quality of the material in Solar Kingdom mean that this taster is still a 16MB download -- you can get it here. The full product is supplied on CD.

The simulator is fully interactive, you can control where and when you go and how fast the simulator runs. You can play with time, setting the simulator up at any point in time and running backwards or forwards. Watching a planet as it rotates and moves away in its orbit at 600x real-time speed is childs play. This all takes place in 3D and full colour on an accurate star backdrop.

The encyclopedia is there to enhance the simulator. Its not just a few pages of text -- over 200 pages and more than 500 images are present. The images have been specially chosen for the high quality. This is not just an idle claim, many, many hours of research went into choosing the best pictures available and providing commentary.

Solar Kingdom will run on virtually any PC that runs a Windows operating system. It has options that scale up or down the graphical quality, but it will run without any problems on a 250MHz Pentium. Its has also been tested on 166MHz systems. Of course it runs beautifully on a modern PC with a 3D graphics card.

We have taken a few high-resolution screen-shots (1024x768) which could be used as desktop wallpaper. If you click on an image it will bring up the full resolution image in a separate window. From there, right-click on the large image and choose 'Set As Wallpaper'.

Jupiter with Io in the foreground. A distant Europa to the right.	Our Moon.	Saturn.