Celestial Isles

Welcome to Celestial Isles. Celestial Isles are island cities that are launched into space for the most spectacular life experience imaginable. We are anticipating strong demand, so if you are planning on taking this once in a lifetime opportunity, act quickly. Prices start at 1e9 tz for a standard 2 person apartment.

Celestial Isles is space island living at it's finest, with an entire city at your disposal. Everything is provided, you only need to bring the clothes on your back. This island comes with our patented Magnetosphere (tm) that will provide views that are both magnificent and entirely unique.

The Magnetosphere is the key to the safety of the isle as it travels through unexplored space. When traveling through high radiation areas, the magnetosphere will automatically envelope the isle, blanketing it in an impenetrable shield from all harmful waves and particles.

The Magnetosphere is also the power source, with enough power to supply a terrestrial city of 100M inhabitants for over 100 years. Celestial Isles hold a maximum of 250K customers plus 100K human staff personnel, so there is plenty of energy to spare.

Celestial Isles are launched through the Europa Wormhole. The destination is the galactic center of the Milky Way, near Sagittarius A*. The total travel time is approximately 12 years, as experienced by the travelers. Due to relativistic effects, the Earth elapsed time is 27 years. Travel time to the wormhole is 4 months. Once we enter the wormhole, communications with Earth will cease for about 11 years until you return.

Once you exit the wormhole near Sagittarius A*, you will be witness to several unprecedented celestial events. In addition, a select group of up to 12 will be able to experience Hyper Time Travel by taking a trip near the Sag A* blackhole to dramatically increase the relativistic effects.

Rarities

35 palettes
3 views, Horizon, Magnetosphere (10% chance), CityCenter (3% chance)

Code

Celestial Isles is written with glsl shaders. It uses numerous fractals mixed with noise and other techniques to achieve the effects. For example, the landscape is mixed with fractal noise, which removes much of the 'fractalness' and gives the landscape a more organic look overall. Shaders give complete control over every pixel drawn on the screen. This allows amazing flexibility in the color model used throughout Celestial Isles.

The city/landscape uses a color mixing model based on trigonometric functions. The base color tends to be a complement of a combination of the colors in the palette, with the highlights using a mix of the palette colors. The magnetosphere uses the palette colors directly, with smooth mixing. The dark/light contrast in the landscape is created by adjusting the weights of the color mixing.

Celestial Isles will age well, in the sense that as resolutions and pixel densities increase, the renderings of Celestial Isles will reflect this and show more detail. You can see this for yourself by comparing views from screens with higher resolution. If you have access to a 4K or larger screen, try it yourself. This is due to the fractal nature of all parts of Celestial Isles. If more details exist in the fractal at finer resolutions, the mathematics of the fractal will expose it. What was once a thin line or color patch may turn out to have rich detail that is only seen at the higher densities/resolutions.

GPU

Celestial Isles is gpu friendly, in that only 1 frame is rendered. It will render quickly on any computer with a minimal gpu.

Animation

You can enable/disable real time animation with the 'r' key. After enabling real time animation, you can use the 'a' key to toggle the magnetosphere animation. Note that this is very gpu intensive.

Sound Track

Each mint comes with one of four beautiful sound tracks to add to the ambiance. You can toggle the audio with the 'v' key.

Keys and mouse:

'v' toggles the audio as does clicking the screen
's' saves a png in the exact size of the screen.
'r' enable or disable animation
'a' start or stop animation