The Feature Requests Collecting Thread

[cyber_space_doc]

emmissive materials already work in verison 1.5.0? Thats brilliant news!

I'll have to try to script some extra variables - I remember theres an addon with ship temperature that could be a good place to start.

I also thought a bit about general relativity, however it might turn out to be a bit hectic to implement...

I suppose a script could change the field of view when the camera is near to a large gravitaional body ...

[rtawxo]

A request for two cool features great for shows and outreach:

1) Anaglyph view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_image
A plus factor is color selectability/tunability in order not to impose a particular set of colours which artificially limits the type of glasses that can be used.

2) Colour and size distortions in travel mode at near lightspeed due to relativistic effects.

[Chuft-Captain]

Emissive materials are supported in Celestia v1.5.0.

Hi Selden,

Sort of related to this, you may remember a PM discussion we had a while ago about displaying nightside lights on spacecraft textures. I never communicated with Chris (Laurel) about this idea, but do you know if he has ever considered the idea?

IMO, this would be a great feature to add to spacecraft textures and I can't see any reason for this to be technically different in the case of spacecraft textures than for planets.

Chris, if you read this, is there any technical reason why nightmaps could not be used with spacecraft textures ?

[selden]

Unfortunately, the SSC declaration NightTexture does not work for models, only for Celestia's builtin spheres.

However, in v1.5.0, you can create an appropriate mesh within the model itself with this line included in its material declaration:

emissivemap "lights.png"

Emissive textures are supported by the CMOD export plugin that I wrote for Anim8or. I don't think 3DS models support it, though.

[Chuft-Captain]

Thanks Selden,

FYI: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=86468#86468

[duds26]

Here is one feature that can save a lot of CPU power and let Celestia render large models with lots of small details a lot faster than now.

DETAIL REGRESSION

(seen this in Unreal Tournament 2004, a nice first person shooter game)
From a distance all model details below a certain size are not rendered at all! But if the player comes closer the details are rendered to match the distance.

So small details that aren't visible don't take precious resources and a lot of CPU power. This happens a lot in Celestia: viewing the O' Neil Colonny from earth (don't know in what post this is), viewing space elevators and so on.....

With a nicely balanced detail regression, Celestia wouldn't render all details that are too small to be seen from the point of view, thereby saving incredibly much resources especially with large, complicated, detailed models. And render details appropriate when zooming in!!!

[ElChristou]

This as been discussed a looong time ago (2005), but nothing came out because if I'm not wrong, Chris at the time was missing from the community... (and I suppose he never went over the topic... )

Topic here:

http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7790&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

[Fenerit]

My dream on Celestia's request now is matter of transparency shaders for the .CMOD's models. For example these:

http://shutter05.pictures.aol.com/data/ ... sO0280.jpg

used in conjuction with the point sprites would be suited for: interstellar dust, strong gravity warped halos and hazes of neutron stars as well as star flares, brillaments and granularity; magnetic fields, X ray-ultraviolet-infrared-microwave emissions, dark matter, space-time gridging, gravitational wavelensing and much more one has much more throw in... Well, the nightmare is over.

[the bluemarble guy]

allowing a script to define a star or any object for that matter changing in size over a certain time. This would allow for demonstraions of the lifecycle of stars. It would be far easier than a making a file with many different objects in it for different sizes.

It could even be set so that there are different stages in which the rate of growth is different.

[bdm]

allowing a script to define a star or any object for that matter changing in size over a certain time. This would allow for demonstraions of the lifecycle of stars. It would be far easier than a making a file with many different objects in it for different sizes.

It could even be set so that there are different stages in which the rate of growth is different.

A related idea would be to allow for cyclical variations. At present only Beginning and Ending parameters are defined. If we could have cyclical variations, we could show the pulsations of Mira, the Earth changing with the seasons, and so forth.

[PlasticMan]

I have a couple requests

Joystick improvements. Would be nice to have roll on joysticks with a twist handle. Currently you have to use the arrow keys, and there is only 1 speed.

Someone else also mentioned this, but goto command is almost instant. Maybee a way to select the speed for it? Rather than going all the way across the galaxy in an instant, selct a speed and enjoy the trip! The universe is huge. Would make celestia feel alot bigger IMO.

Addon manager would be very useful.

[duds26]

Looked around in other topics and posts:

The two features that would improve Celestia most would be
- Addon Manager
- detail regression (much complaigns about system requirements: a lot of addons are very heavy because Celestia renders all the detials even when those details are not visible)

[starfleetengineer]

Rather than going all the way across the galaxy in an instant, selct a speed and enjoy the trip! The universe is huge. Would make celestia feel alot bigger IMO.

If UR using 1.4.1 then I suggest you download and install my WARPDRIVE.

[cyber_space_doc]

I think a good new addition would be to have C/C++ plugins!

- the plugin could be .dll based
- could allow users to write C/C++ code to incorporate additional rendering settings similar to the alternative surfaces feature.

[cyber_space_doc]

I thought that it should be possible to minimize or dock the windows dialog boxes in celestia, since it is difficult to see when all of the windows are opened at once.

[Kolano]

I think a good new addition would be to have C/C++ plugins!

- the plugin could be .dll based
- could allow users to write C/C++ code to incorporate additional rendering settings similar to the alternative surfaces feature.

Celestia, along with most of the PC software world, has been moving in the direction of using shaders to control it's graphics outputs. To alter most rendering settings you'd need to alter the contents of the "Celestia\shaders" directory rather than (or perhaps in addition to) writing C/C++ code.

[cyber_space_doc]

To alter most rendering settings you'd need to alter the contents of the "Celestia\shaders" directory rather than (or perhaps in addition to) writing C/C++ code.

probably. The technique I had in mind is GPU Geometry clipmapping, definately requiring C/C++ and shader code.

I think that it would be good if users who had such algorithms working in their own test apps could also plug them in to celestia, and perhaps even share them online

[ElChristou]

I thought that it should be possible to minimize or dock the windows dialog boxes in celestia, since it is difficult to see when all of the windows are opened at once.

Once the cross platform UI will be done, I suppose a big polishing work on the UI will start to see what can be done at this level...

[PlasticMan]

Someone mentioned somthing simmilar a few posts up, but would be a nice feature to be able to resize and make some of the windows transparent. imagine having the starbrowser open while your exploring and being able to resize it, and have the window transparent where only the text and border show. Anyone who has played EVE-online will know what im talking about.

I know its a long shot but figured it was worth throwing out there.

[LordFerret]

I still would like to see the ability to load and unload addons. I think that would have a major impact on scripting.