Optimized IAU-location label distribution for the Moon

[t00fri]

Hi all,

I have further improved the theoretical derivation of an
importance weight function of the location sizes that
suppresses label crowdedness and overlap!

For people interested in the theory, here is my Maple
9.5 worksheet:

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/Moon.html

and here is a composite of the moon at vastly different
sizes along with the vastly different numbers of
displayed location labels. The locations of biggest size
have highest display priority.

My optimized IAU-location label distributions for
Mars, Venus and Moon will be part of the forthcoming Celestia 1.3.2 distribution.


Bye Fridger

[julesstoop]

In my opinion it would be nice if we wouldn't see any of the location labels any more beyond a certain distance (eg. last picture). Just one label saying 'locations' or something would tell us the object has defined locations on it's surface.

[t00fri]

In my opinion it would be nice if we
wouldn't see any of the location labels any more beyond
a certain distance (eg. last picture). Just one label saying
'locations' or something would tell us the object has
defined locations on it's surface.

Of course, the labels go entirely away at
sufficiently large distance. There is also a distance,
where only one label is seen, the biggest of all. That's all
built in. I might make the label decrease at large
distances a little faster yet, perhaps.

Oh yes, I should mention that I am using larger fonts
than default, since I have 1600x1200 on a 19" monitor.
So for 1024x768 on a 17" for example, and for smaller
fonts, the labels on the smallest moon above are very
conveniently apart!

Here is an illustration what becomes of my above images
at still larger distances:



There is however still a nasty "flickering labels bug" in
Chris' code that has to be eliminated, first. It is related as
so often to an accuracy issue due to single precision in
openGL.

Bye Fridger