Ideas for next version of Celestia

[Stargazer_2098]

What about some kind of co-operation with Martin Schweiger and his freeware product Orbiter?
For those of you that dont know, Orbiter is the most realistic nevtonian-physics simulator to date. What orbiter dont have, is the possibility of interstellar-travel.
While Celestia is a 3D-planetarium that could need such physics (as that would aslo make it easier to create events like asteroid impacts and space-ships).
So why not create some kind of a port between the two products, so that Celestia can take advantage of Orbiter's great nevtonian-physics engine, while Orbiter gets the advantage of the Celestia-engine, so that one day, we might see interstellar travel in it.

Might be a long-shot, but I say it could be worth it. For both the products have something in common;
they are both about space, they both have revolutionery engines, and they are both some of the very best freeware products ever!


Stargazer.

[Guest]

Two conflicting sugestions :
1) Collision detection to stop the viewpoint passing through things. It would look really good if, instead of just flying through the planets, the viewpoint would maintain a fixed distance from them and fly around them in part of an orbit (to get to the other side).
2) Show different layers as you pass through the planets e.g display some sort of green rock-type texture for the Earth's mantle and orange glow for the core. This might be silly but I think it would look good for the gas giants - try the jupiter clouds download and move through it quite fast - it looks good. Multiple cloud layers would be amazing.


(Mad Boris)

[Guest]

Stargazer : I've tried orbiter. It looks nice, but how do I use it ?

(Mad Boris)

[Stargazer_2098]

For any questions about using Orbiter, please consult the manual, or the Orbiter's official forums at http://www.orbitersim.com/

Remember; Orbiter does not yet have a installation-program. So after having downloaded all the zip-files, you have to unzip them unto a folder on your HD.
Remember to keep the folders-name option on while unzipping, that way the files will install themself's in the correct folders.
When you have unzipped all the files, run Orbiter.exe, and get ready to become a virtual astronaut.

Stargazer.

[SOme_user]

What about some kind of co-operation with Martin Schweiger and his freeware product Orbiter?
For those of you that dont know, Orbiter is the most realistic nevtonian-physics simulator to date. What orbiter dont have, is the possibility of interstellar-travel.
While Celestia is a 3D-planetarium that could need such physics (as that would aslo make it easier to create events like asteroid impacts and space-ships).
So why not create some kind of a port between the two products, so that Celestia can take advantage of Orbiter's great nevtonian-physics engine, while Orbiter gets the advantage of the Celestia-engine, so that one day, we might see interstellar travel in it.

Might be a long-shot, but I say it could be worth it. For both the products have something in common;
they are both about space, they both have revolutionery engines, and they are both some of the very best freeware products ever!


Stargazer.

Orbiter is DirectX so i wish goood luck

[O.F.Fascist]

I just started using Celestia a few days ago, and I have to say I love it.

One thing that I would like to see is the ability to set a date and time, so instead of having to speed forward or backwards to get to where you want the universe to be, you can just start at the specific time.

[Guest]

I just started using Celestia a few days ago, and I have to say I love it.

One thing that I would like to see is the ability to set a date and time, so instead of having to speed forward or backwards to get to where you want the universe to be, you can just start at the specific time.

It seems few days is not enough to discover all menu items

[Kendrix]

Clearly mr guest :lol: :lol: :lol:

[rwa2]

http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/ has a few things that could be interesting:

Most useful, he composites live cloud imagemaps every hour from GEOS, METEOSAT, and GMS satellites (since they're geostationary, he has to fabricate some data for the poles).

I'd also like to see things like support for the marker files to label lat/lon positions on planets.

How about some GPS support, so you could display / zoom to your current location on the planet? Has anyone created models and orbits for the GPS satellite constellation yet?

Along those lines, how about allowing detail map overlays onto planets, along the lines of GPS3D (http://www.mgix.com/gps3d/). It looks like mapquest also offers pretty recent aerial photo coverage of the continental US now. The Microsft Terraserver (http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/default.asp) also is a good source of US terrain data.

Most difficult of all, how about some actual elevation map support for mountains and stuff (not just bumpmaps)?

[abiogenesis]

What about options to invert the mouse? We'd need separate options for camera rotation and object rotation. The 3D mouse interface I'm most accustomed to is that of a First-Person Shooter. I know Celestia's no FPS, but every time I want to rotate the camera I have to fight with the other side of my brain. It's like trying to write with your left hand .

-abiogenesis-

[Size_Mick]

Well a few people have mentioned getting "real" cloud images into Celestia, but the ultimate would of course be if Celestia could update the cloud images itself, automatically, without having to be restarted. I'm guessing that getting the images is not the hard part, but rather Celestia updating the image while running. I imagine that the program was not designed to allow textures to be replaced on the fly, but then I'm no programmer (and I've only had the program a few days).

By the way, I have to say that I'm highly impressed with this program as it is. I've run Ssystem since it first came out. Not knowing that they had changed the name of the program, I didn't discover that it had been updated (a Google search for Ssystem several months back yielded NO results for Openuniverse.org's website, and the original Ssystem home page is still up - sort of - but mentions nothing about Openuniverse). I discovered Openuniverse and Celestia quite by accident, when checking out the homepage for Earth3D for updates to that program. I happened to stroll by the links page and so here I am today. Glad I finally discovered this program; I had given up hope of anyone ever taking the time to make such a creature :P

While Celestia is not a game in itself, I think it might be sort of a neat idea to include "games" of some sort, educational in nature. Perhaps some sort of advanced scripting engine like Chris was speaking of could support things like "Guess the Planet" or "Guess the Constellation" where it would focus in on a particular planet or constellation, and ask the user to input the name, then tell them whether they were right or not, giving X number of guesses and dropping hints for each wrong answer? Or maybe a constellation "Connect the Dots" where you click from star to star in a constellation, and when you get 2 that connect, the line appears? Or you have to click on all of the stars in the constellation, and when you click a star that is in the constellation, it shows the name of the star to show you got it right, and you get a sound or message indicating when you click on a star that is wrong, then when you've clicked all of the right stars, the connecting lines appear? I'm just shooting from the hip but you get the general idea.

There are all sorts of educational uses for a program like this, depending on its flexibility. BTW speaking of constellations, I presume that the lines connecting the stars are purely up to artistic taste, since it seems that images I've seen before show different lines for the same constellation? Or are there "line images" that are accepted as standard by the astronomical community?

Anyhow, it's a great program, and I'm glad to see such great new ideas coming out of people's minds for future versions!

[Ortolan]

Not sure if this has been suggested already but I think a 'brightness' slider would be handy. I'm on the computer all day so I have the monitor brightness set to only 25% to prevent by eyes being burned to a crisp. The downside is that anything on the screen that isn't bright (eg Galaxies) becomes invisible.

[booger]

I think it would be great if you could add a script command that plays a pre-recorded sound file. It could be used to play educational speeches during the tour guide selections and demo scripts.

I am a voice actor by trade, and would love to be able to help create some educational tours of the galaxy for school kids. If someone wants to work with me on this, providing the support is added to Celestia to play audio files, contact me at johnjdick@yahoo.com

A good format to use would probably be ogg vorbis. I believe you can use the ogg libraries without paying any kind of royalty. It also has excellent compression.

[Stargazer_2098]

"....And to your right, you can see Jupiter and its moons passing by. And look, here comes Saturn with it's huge rings and mysterious moons.
See to your left: there is Titan, the most mysterious of all its moons, it is the only sub-planetary object that has atmosphere.
What lies beyond these dence clouds is unkown for the time being, but NASA and ESA has allready sent out a probe to investigate. The probe should arrive by the year 2004.
Now; strap on your seatbelt, for we are going to explore our galaxy and it's many wonders."

Yes, I agree. Voice acting is a very good idea.


Stargazer.

[alexis]

Another thing I wish in Celestia, or rather in the forum, I must say: Avatars, the little picture under our names giving a little decoration.

I haven't tried it yet, but phpBB does support avatars . . .

I never see the avatars of people, I only see this broken link to an image under the author name of some authors.

/Alexis

[ZenMomentum]

OK, Here's what I would like to see:

1) A URL scheme that would allow the sharing of locations, times and track settings via the Internet. This may have to be encoded representation of binary data, not sure maybe the experts can pipe in.

2) In the same vein, Multiuser support allowing for multiple users to share the same camera/spacecraft over a network.

3) Dynamic real-time textures for the earth reading from satellite weather maps and rendering cloud cover based on that data.

[Miserableman]

Having seen the Earth 3D screensaver, I really like the idea of the sun being as bright on screen as it is in real life. Perhaps an option to put any local stars up to full brightness, with a comparitive upping of specular effects?

[Rassilon]

I haven't tried it yet, but phpBB does support avatars . . .

Chris, in the forum preferences...you probably have allow user avatars unchecked or vice-versa...

[abiogenesis]

Alright. I've heard a lot of people up here asking for real-time cloud maps for the Earth and I have a problem. While the idea sounds intriguing, I'm not sure I have a good grasp of how a feature like this would be implemented.

Real-Time cloud maps are... well, real-time. Celestia is a bit more flexible with how it handles time. What happens to the clouds when I look at the Earth sometime in the future? Or the past? Would the real-time maps only work when the time scale is 1.0? If so, what happens otherwise?

Now, I'm not knocking the feature -- it sounds very cool -- I just don't get it. Perhaps a more detailed explanation? Please?

A related feature -- and one I completely understand -- would be the general support of animated texture maps. Animated textures could make all kinds of things look pretty. Obviously, there's the cloud maps, but imagine what you could do with animated bump maps...

With cycling, animated textures, the whole flexible time scale is no longer an issue. It's completely deterministic. Just like a good piece of software should be!

-abiogenesis-

[Size_Mick]

Abiogenesis, my total lack in programming knowledge leads me to believe it would work something like this:

An additional daemon or applet built into Celestia would automatically download an updated cloud pattern image from one of the sites mentioned in other posts in this thread. It would check for a new image every hour, download it, convert it to an appropriate size/format, and replace the current cloud image with the updated one. You could have check boxes in the GUI to turn the feature on or off, and whether to do it only when Celestia is in real current time, or always. You could even have Celestia set current time automatically by contacting an atomic clock server. So you could just have a view of the Earth on your desktop in the Celestia window, with a relatively current view of the cloud patterns, updated hourly.