Mitaka Version 1.0 was released

[ElChristou]

Well, here it is in Celestia. This is a point sprite cmod of the very same data set:
...
This is kind of neat. When viewed from Earth, you can see clearly the swath that was covered by the SDSS:
...

Nice! I'm wondering how is planified this kind of survey... anyone knows?

Chris, will you do this model public?

[chris]

Here are some impressions of Mitaka in "Cosmo" mode that I would have loved to see also in Celestia.

Well, here it is in Celestia. This is a point sprite cmod of the very same data set:
...
--Chris

You used Selden's old add-on, I suppose.

No. I wrote a quick C++ program to convert Mitaka's data file into a cmod composed of point sprites. It lacks the coloration that Selden added to indicate which objects came from which surveys.

Chris, will you do this model public?

Yes I will after I make a couple modifications. The version shown uses point sprites, which don't currently work on the Mac (I strongly suspect a driver problem.) I'll make a version that uses plain old points, which should work fine, though it will look slightly less attractive.

One glaring hole in Celestia is that there's no way right now toggle object visibility. You don't want to be looking at SDSS data set all the time, but there's no way to turn it off other than to disable all nebulae. This is why I'm excited about the idea of adding custom object classes and an object visibility flag.

--Chris

[t00fri]

OK, after exploring intensively the possibilities of Mitaka during the
last several hours and writing most provocative mails
about its "triumph over Celestia"...let me get serious
again


Here are my /personal/ (serious) consclusions:
----------------------------------------------------------
--Yes I do think Mitaka has considerable potential, since
it's design target is to render the Universe from our
backyard to it's presently known limits. So
necessarily Mitaka's creators are devoting more active
thoughts to rendering Cosmology than we do.

That I find great, obviously!

--I think, if we compare the capabilities of Mitaka 1.0 with
Celestia's first appearance in public (Celestia 1.1 or so)
Mitaka's performance is most remarkable.

-- I do particularly like the real time topographic
rendering that is certainly related to what Worldwind does.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
--On the other hand, Celestia does have a number of
strong aspects, that I am of course aware of!

So our favorite program is still alive and pretty well...
(despite my nasty provocations )
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

--Altogether, I think Celestia is more versatile in many
respects. Navigating AND selecting objects in space is
way superior and notably more intuitive. Also Celestia's data
base is far more advanced. I could not find out yet how
easy it is to use custom textures/data with Mitaka.
Presently, the base texture for Earth is still BlueMarble
1st generation rather than BMNG, for example.

-- The rendering of Mitaka's MilkyWay looks great, but I
strongly doubt that such a rendering concept could handle
10000+ galaxies with acceptable performance.

+++++++++++++++++++++
Nevertheless, I think the sudden appearance of Mitaka
with its surprising degree of maturity should be taken as a
warning. We should definitely invest more time for
actively planning ahead! Addressing little improvements
here and there for better fractions of a year is not enough
on the long run. I strongly feel that Celestia needs kind of
a task force of knowledgeable people exploring new
visualization challenges for the near future in concrete
"pre-coding" terms!
++++++++++++++++++++++

Bye Fridger

[chris]

I disagree. A long list of exoplanet data is in the 'data' directory... . OK SPIRES is still missing

Bye Fridger

Also missing is any sort of orbital data. There's just a list of planet names with the HIPPARCOS ids of the stars they orbit. The only thing that you can do with exoplanets is to highlight the stars that host them.

--Chris

Yes, I know. What was possible about Exoplanets at the times of Celestia 1.1 ? . Do you really think that within another year or so, they won't be able to implement also orbits for exos and the various other features that you emphasized earlier in favor of Celestia?

It's possible, but I doubt it. Quite a lot of work and refinement went into those features in Celestia. Exoplanets were fully supported early on in Celestia, the result of a fundamental design decision to use high precision 128-bit coordinates within Celestia. Otherwise, the only part of the universe that you could zoom in on would be the origin--floating point precision would be a problem everywhere else. It's a serious amount of work to retrofit high precision coordinates into an application that doesn't already use them, such as Mitaka. The developers are obviously very smart people, so I'm sure that they could do it if they wanted to, but it's far from trivial.

At least one can also mark binary stars NOW which I find useful.

Definitely. Why not implement this in Celestia's star browser?

I just can't help seeing a LOT of potential in the design of Mitaka.

Certainly there is, but I don't care for your implication throughout this discussion that everything in Celestia is trivial.

--Chris

[t00fri]

...
Certainly there is, but I don't care for your implication throughout this discussion that everything in Celestia is trivial.
...
--Chris

Sorry if my provocations went overboard . See my mail above your last one...

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

...
-- The rendering of Mitaka's MilkyWay looks great, but I
strongly doubt that such a rendering concept could handle
10000+ galaxies with acceptable performance.
...

I'm pretty sure some solutions can be found; the task is not to render 10000+ galaxies all in the same time!
If we could find a way to do a kind of decimation of the models depending on the area on screen it fill, we could easely have a much complex model for close up... let say that what we have actually would be like a mid range rendering, zooming in it would reveal a thinner structure...

[Cham]

Just to add my 2 cents.

I think that Celestia could be much more competitive if we had few more USEFULL features, that we could use on a daily basis, instead of many small (and uncomplete) rendering options with OGL2. I'm even ready to abandon the sprite models (for the moment), so we could see some really usefull features to be implemented. I think that those usefull features should become a priority :

1- A script menu (located in the file menu), showing all scripts located in a "scripts" folder (located in the base directory).

2- A set of custom classes "layers", that we could turn ON/OFF on the fly using the keyboard (ctrl-1, ctrl-2, ctrl-3, or command-1, command-2, .. on the Mac). We could associate many Selden like coordinates grids to these "layers", for example, magnetic field lines and other information.

What frustrates me the most these days, about Celestia, are the partial, uncomplete features like these :

1- Cloud shadows not working (at least on my Mac).

2- Atmosphere code uncomplete, and not working when there are more than one source of light (vivid atmosphere if there are two stars...).

3- Boring stars to the extreme, with their pale and basic texture for ALL star classes, without any atmosphere ! And the star's halo isn't even behaving in a proper way : disappearing abruptly when the observer moves at some intermediate distance.

4- Stars labels unfinished, while they should behave like Fridger's code for the galaxies labels.

5- Asteroids and comets labels are still overlapping, when the user is using a large data file. The labels should behave a bit like Fridger's galactic code. Need a major code rewrite there.

6- Impossibility to change the orbital paths and labels colors (planets, moons, asteroids, etc). For example : the comets are still using the same colors as the galaxies labels, which is really confusing.

7- Impossibility to set a bump map on asteroids (and I'm yet unable to make a normal map on any asteroid).

8- Sprites models buggy as hell on the Mac (completely crashing the machine, which shouldn't never happen).

9- unreliable setup of models on the ground of a planet (moving and fluctuating ground, black holes on the sky, ...).

Since last YEAR (at the very least), the ONLY really usefull new features are all related to the galaxies, and some aspects in model rendering.

[t00fri]

...
-- The rendering of Mitaka's MilkyWay looks great, but I
strongly doubt that such a rendering concept could handle
10000+ galaxies with acceptable performance.
...

I'm pretty sure some solutions can be found; the task is not to render 10000+ galaxies all in the same time!
If we could find a way to do a kind of decimation of the models depending on the area on screen it fill, we could easely have a much complex model for close up... let say that what we have actually would be like a mid range rendering, zooming in it would reveal a thinner structure...

Christophe,

sure what you are addressing runs under the heading of (octree) culling. If this is optimized, the problem will certainly be alleviated. Yet, I was watching how the 3d rendering of the arms of the Mitaka MilkyWay is continuously modified during an approach towards the galaxy...This looks good, but it takes a LOT of time, compared to what we devote up to now. The performance of Mitaka is just way too slow near the MilkyWay for average computers. Toti and I did a hell of a lot of optimizations to be able to cope with so many galaxies without significant slow down.


Another issue is that up to now, a crucial point was to entirely reconstruct a given galaxy ONLY from the scientific catalog information without adding /phantasy/. I definitely like things to stay this way...

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Just to add my 2 cents.

I think that Celestia could be much more competitive if we had few more USEFULL features, that we could use on a daily basis, instead of many small (and uncomplete) rendering options with OGL2.

Cham,

this is PRECISELY what I feel as well. We should concentrate to finish those things to perfection that are really essential. Forget about the many small and mostly half-finished "goodies" and rather concentrate more on planning future major improvements/enhancements.

Bye Fridger

PS:

Stars labels unfinished, while they should behave like Fridger's code for the galaxies labels.

And it's all finished and nicely working for stars, asteroids,...since ~ 1 year. It has not been implemented yet because Chris requested other options beyond what I did so far. After noting how "unpleasing" AND crowded the labelling looks in Mitaka, I am even more convinced that my present scheme is way superior.

[danielj]

I don??t understand how can you get such high resolution textures.Do you use Celestia textures?

Here are a few shots of the general graphics.

Saturn with smooth orbit displays and nebulosity visible in Orion's belt and around the trapezium



Earth topography from low altitude



The topographical aspects are also realized different/ better than in Celestia. One may e.g. switch between different levels of topographic exageration during the display.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

I don??t understand how can you get such high resolution textures.Do you use Celestia textures?

..

Of course not. It's all default, except the two topography files of Earth and Mars that go into the Mitaka/data directory.
They may be downloaded from the Mitaka site.

These Files give the amazing real 3d rendering. But for Saturn these are irrelevant.

Bye Fridger

[danielj]

I think I found,but the result is better with Mars than with Earth.What about the 4D Theater?How can I use it?

I don??t understand how can you get such high resolution textures.Do you use Celestia textures?

..

Of course not. It's all default, except the two topography files of Earth and Mars that go into the Mitaka/data directory.
They may be downloaded from the Mitaka site.

These Files give the amazing real 3d rendering. But for Saturn these are irrelevant.

Bye Fridger

[Don. Edwards]

Here Is My Review Of Mitaka
When I first saw the post I thought this looks interesting.
Well I downloaded and tried and I have a few things to say about it.
Some of the features are nice and of course would be welcome in Celestia, but being locked to the menu system for navigation is a bit of a drag, I don?€™t like it and many other won?€™t either. The navigation with the mouse is a bit off than it is in Celestia, so those used to doing things one way will have a bit of a learning curve.
The rendering of the Milkyway is nice, but it could use some work. I think the rendering of the stars could be done a bit better. Allot of the more advanced features are nice. I am not a techno geek , educator or a Scientist so there value to me at this point are limited.
Now about the graphics. The textures are just like Celestia's base textures, low resolution and nothing at all to talk about. The rendering of the atmosphere around Earth looks good until you get at some distance then is looses it effects. I didn't play with the topographical features because I started losing interest by then, but from what I have seen of the screen captures, the elevation rendering is good and something we all would kill to have in Celestia, but the textures used are subpar to what we have available to us in Celestia. I hope they move to more realistic textures in the future. Also as Chris noted this program is written in Direct X 8.1 and some basic OpenGL thrown as well according to Chris. I am really surprised that they didn't use at least some DX 9 code as its only been out for three years now. I truly don't think it looks any better than Orbiter does at this point. As far as I can see there doesn't seem to be an easy way to modify anything in it, or to add your personal preferences for textures except to simply replace the stock with your own and there is no bumpmaping or use of normalmaps at this point. So all palnets are going to looked like painted spheres until they implement this if they intend to.

All in all it?€™s exactly what a first release of a piece of software like this should be. But it lacks allot of the polish that Celestia has, simply because of its maturity and until it can be opened up for the moding uses, I personally am not interested. I also feel that the public release should have been held off until a full English manual was available. It so much easier to translate an English manual to other languages than it is from Japanese to English or say German or French. At this point it?€™s just another one of the run of the mill planetarium programs, but with a few oh ah features, and there are a few of them available out there. Will this one dominate the scene, not at this time, but maybe in the future? There is more than enough room for both Celestia, Mitaka, and the others. I don't think it is better than Celestia, it?€™s just different and has a features that sets it apart. Time will tell and so will an English program manual.

That?€™s my opinion and I am sticking to it.

Don. Edwards

[JetCrow]

Mitaka Plus v1.0 Released
http://orihalcon.jp/mitakaplus/index_e.html
There is also a Macintosh version.

[bh]

Hmmm... will give the mac version a try.

Edit... crashes on start. Oh well.

[ElChristou]

Hmmm... will give the mac version a try.

Edit... crashes on start. Oh well.

Same for me... Seems Mitaka really need some debugging...

[Cham]

Yes, it's crashing at startup on my Mac too.

[rra]

Of course not. It's all default, except the two topography files of Earth and Mars that go into the Mitaka/data directory.
They may be downloaded from the Mitaka site.

Fridger, where exactly did you find these hires topography files ?



Ren?©

[t00fri]

Of course not. It's all default, except the two topography files of Earth and Mars that go into the Mitaka/data directory.
They may be downloaded from the Mitaka site.

Fridger, where exactly did you find these hires topography files ?



Ren?©

Ren?©,

they entertain different pages/versions of pages it seems:
Look at the bottom of this one:
http://www.systranbox.com/systran/box?s ... am/mitaka/

Bye Fridger

[neo albireo]

It runs well on my Macbook Pro. Are you sure you did not replace the whole folders, but just the files inside the folder?

Actually I think that those cool functions that Mitaka offers and that are lacking in Celestia could mostly be implemented by only one change: Customized toggling of addons. My wildest phantasies are like this, but maybe some people have better ideas:

Inside the extras folder, there should be the folders with the names "1"-"9". Inside these folders one can place all add-ons that then can be toggled in the menu or by some key combinations. I would then p.e. place the graticules in "1", the deep space data in "2", the constellations in "3", all fictional stuff in "4", magnetic fields in "5" or similar. Even better would be to be able to give those folders names that would appear in the menu bar.

If something like this was enabled, the only thing missing would be the 3D landscape rendering. Then Celestia would be the champion in all disciplines.