Frank,
fsgregs wrote:Fridger;
I wanted to include FT 1.1 in my CD for ONLY one reason. It is worth it! I am not going to sell any more CD's because of FT 1.1 Teachers will not know it is even present. They will buy Celestia Educational Activities because they want a stunning educational program to take their kids into space. Whether the CD includes 1.4.0pre6 or FT1.1 will make no difference in sales, or in my profits.
OK that sounds fair enough...Also as I said, I don't have a problem with this. I just thought the CD publisher was sitting in your neck!
What it will do is give everyone who experiences Celestia for the first time the thrill of seeing the universe's true glory .... its galaxies. That was always the main weakness of Celestia, and you and Toti fixed it.
I agree of course, but what about those
beautiful galactic clusters, planetary nebulae etc? 
This will unfortunately take until FT2.x (the next major FT version)
I wanted anyone buying the CD (or downloading my Activities for free from the web) to have the pleasure of experiencing that ... of experiencing your work!!!! The universe is worth it. It deserves the beauty that you have just built into it!!! If we all have gotten so much enjoyment out of journeying through space, why not share it with as many people as possible?
If I make any money on offering my Activities to schools ... great. If I don't ... so what! For three years, I've been a volunteer contributor to Celestia as a labor of love anyway.
THAT is why I have been pushing you to release FT 1.1.
That's all fine from my point of view (and in addition satisfies a most useful purpose: education & motivation of kids!).
Still it might perhaps be interesting for you, that --as to myself-- I would immediately leave the Celestia community, if the core distribution was one day allocated (in part) to some commercial taget (NASA, promotional,....) .
I don't give a damn about the date. It looks funny to have a comma in it, but if you won't change it ... no big deal! Distance and speed displays are easier to read with commas and they should stay.
There is nothing to change as I wrote.
It's just up to the users of how they prefer the system configuration.
If you can dim down the Milky Way from Earth's viewpoint, or at least give folks the option to do so if they desire, I believe it will better represent the true brightness of the haze of the Milky Way as seen from Earth. If you won't do that either ... I'll live with it.
I did it already for testing. Let's see how we go there.
I "suggest" that you remove the "set Marker" option in Start.cel. In my humble opinion, Celestia should open without a red box centered in the middle of Earth.
That is an important point for the following reason:
Naively YES, we don't need markers they are only disturbing... (still I always have them ON
)
But: FT1.2 will come with a neat new dynamical label display that avoids their overlap or overcrowdedness of labels. In this case, you might well only see the location of the sought for galaxy in form of the (red) marker diamond at first. Then after centering the marker (hitting c), by means of SHIFT + mouse L you zoom in : suddenly lots of labels appear and also move out of the screen again while the field of view decreases further. Then, finally that dim target galaxy
and its label appear!
Perhaps you can see that with this new important and quite stunning feature, markers might play a new important role.
But until then everyone who dislikes visible markers, can just comment out the command
renderflags {set "markers"}
in the 'start.cel' script . That's really no big deal.
Bye Fridger
