New here, couple questions

[PlasticMan]

Hello everyone. First let me say Celestia is amazing! I find it hard to believe this is a free program. Hats off to the programers!

A couple noob questions if you dont mind.....
Is it possible to fly by an object, lets say a space station or satilite, and keep the view centered on the object while I keep the same heading? I played around with it for a bit but as I turned the view my heading wanted to change as well.

Also, While using a joystick, Im having a small problem with navigation. When I turn right and up I can make very small corse corrections. But when I turn left and down, the smallest amount of pressure on the stick causes the screen to jump as if I pulled the stick all the way, as if there is no acceleration for those directions, only full turn. I tryed 3 different joysticks as well as calibrating them and reinstalling drivers, nothing seems to help. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Last question. Is it possible render a screen overlay or in other words a cockpit pannel? How about a 3d model that will stay center screen?

Pleae forgive my noobness! Thanks for any help you can give.

[BrainDead]

Sorry,

I'm not certain that I understand your question...

Have you tried using the FOLLOW {} instruction before
trying to run around the selected object?

If you like, you can download some previous scripts
from the Clestia Motherlode in order to examine a wealth
of other scripting endeavours. These may give you some
help from other people's experience.

Don't really know if this helps or not, but I thought I'd
try.

Take care, Bob

[JimHarvie]

Welcome to the Celestia community PlasticMan!. You are right it is a wonderful program.
Let me take a shot at answering two out of three of your questions.
!) Yes, kinda sorta, but you sort of have to cheat. What I do when I want to do this is position myself fairly far, but just in sight of the object with another object as my 'destination' almost in line with it and Folow this object instead. Remember that small objects are moving fast relative to their size, while large ones move slow in the sense that it takes a relatively long time to move a distance equivalent to its size. So the cheat involves slowing time for small objects like the space station or speeding time up for large ones like planets or suns. Similarly the speed you travel at should be slow for small objects and larger for bigger ones. Also, learn the shortcuts for controls that may not be avialable to your joystick, they may be the most handy for this. This is my sneaky way of suggesting that learning the keyboard shortcuts before using a joystick might be a good idea. BrainDeads adivice should be followed in any event as there is a wealth of info to be gotten. This is especially true if you try to learn how to write a cel.
3) I am sure I read that some kind of space-ship console or 'view port' is in the works for the next version but keep in mind this will take up valuable screen space.
I hope this helps,
Jim

[fsgregs]

PlasticMan:

There already is a version of Celestia that incorporates a spaceship cockpit. To see it, you have to download a different Celestia application call Celestia-Patch3. You also have to download the cockpit texture itself.

You can get the alternate program here: http://vincent.gian.club.fr/celestia/celestia_win32_1.4.1_patch3.zip

Download it, unzip it directly to your Celestia folder. You will find a new version of Celestia in the folder.

I am searching for the link to the cockpit texture. I will post it soon.

I do not know why your joystick commands are behaving funny. That should obviously not be happening. Sorry!!!

Frank

[PlasticMan]

Thanks for the replys! I spent some time learning the key commands and am doing much better. Still have the joystick problem, cant seem to figure that one out. I loaded celestia on my secondary PC and get the same thing there!!
Anyway, Thanks for the link. I will check it out tonight on my home PC.