DOWNLOAD Celestia patch3 final: sound, image/text overlay...

[ElChristou]

...I cannot see many chances for a later reunion. I could easily detail my statements, but at this time I guess it would unnecessarily heat up the discussion...

I forgot:

In this case they won't be any later reunion because of the real difference of purpose of the "Celestia Edu"... it will just be a different tool.

IMO there is no reasons for hot discussions here, I'm not educator myself but have some familiar in the branch so I can understand the + of those features in this context; again if the dev team say "we are not interested" and if people feel the necesity to fork to save those features (and dev them later), well IMO no problemo...

[ElChristou]

....
Hey Chris what are you waiting to give to all those good fellows your opinion???

We just communicated. Chris is working on some quite interesting Celestia feature...

Bye Fridger

Yes, less the fix of the CmodTool on osX which I need to release models ... yes I now, it's not a really fascinating task...

Seriously, I think we all know that the dev is far from be stopped at this time, even if we don't see much of the iceberg... it's why I'm not preocuped by this new forking topic...

[fsgregs]

As an educator, I use a customized version of Celestia, which includes the sound and overlay texture and Dr. Joe features, and also will now include in the future, the infotext and infoimage features. I can see that some folks don't need these things and are content with just cruising Celestia's beautiful space with the default app. Conversely, these features have great potential for adding structure and educational richness to the use of Celestia in a classroom, and I can see a real value in them being in the default release. They certainly don't hurt anything to be there.

IF Vincent and Victor and Boux and Dr. Joe, who have taken the ball here and run with it for these new features, all vowed to continue developing a separate parallel application for Celestia for years to come, then maybe it would be OK to pursue two Celestia versions. However, what if Vincent loses interest? Then, all these new features will be lost.

I would, therefore, lean toward merging the new features into the default Celestia version.

Just my opinion!!!

Frank

[ElChristou]

...However, what if Vincent loses interest? Then, all these new features will be lost...

This is the risk...

Now, those features are presented from a quite long time now, so if the dev team (principaly the Big Boss) was interested I suppose they would have already said something... no?

[Paolo]

Precisely this should be the second attempt. One per year when the situation, despite the recent rassicurations, seems going really bad.
As usual my unique objective is to keep the project alive. If during 4 months nothing significant happens in CVS, a project don't seem very alive.

It is very far to come, but for sure in my future personal plans there is a fork of Celestia.
My fork will be called Observer and will include many of the features that has been requested during these years to the Celestia developers. Some of these new features will be "cosmetic" improvements, other will be substantial. For sure Observer won't be something like a videogame.

In the meantime I think that I'll follow an eventual fork made by Vincent, because IMHO the purpose of a software is to aid the users to solve their real problems or to give to the users something fun and recreational.

The point of view of many seems to be: Celestia is for the scientists.
But do really the scientists use Celestia? During these years I haven't seen soo many scientists in these forums. IMHO scientists are using different tools to visualize the universe. Scientists do not need to see so many visual effects, I think that they would like to have other features in Celestia.
Even hobbistic astronomers do not use Celestia also if its astronomical mechanics is at least equal if not better than the ones used in popular software used as aid in astronomical observations with telescopes. E.g. add to Celestia the features to make it similar to Cartes Du Ciel seems not very difficult to do.

Beside this as discussed many times with Christophe I still belive that first of all Celestia needs a more friendly and cross platform user interface. Not to help in remembering the long number of shortcuts present in Celestia (we all know the effectiveness of the 10 fingertips technology), but to aid the representation and the query of scientifical data that now Celestia hides behind the scenes.

Celestia is a simulation but is also a 3D user interface to a potentially gigantic database of astronomical data that do not allows to browse, or even to edit the data in place. If this data is scientifical or fictional matters, it is important!
Celestia has't a system that allows to identify what is fictional and wat is not! So this is why for instance an addon-manager is required, not to help newbies in creating and distributing add-ons, but in identifying the source and the authors of the data even if fictional and scientifical are mixed. Personally I would like to use only scientifical data, I'm a purist about this. If I go on motherlode which are the possibilities of finding true/approved/verified scientifical data? None except the trust in the add-on developer. Unacceptable.

And so on ... we can discuss about the fact that the standard package (with its set of textures) is almos ridiculous if applied to the current mid size 3D hardware capabilities on the market. If a user wants to have a good graphics experience has to search and try several add-ons stored in different web places. A set of recommended downloads MUST be added in the standard distribution.

But these are discussions submitted so many times. If something new will happen (e.g. a fork made by Vincent) it is welcome. There should be so much things to do to improve Celestia, the ideas are flowing.

Kind regards.

[t00fri]

Let me make a few further comments about the features in Vincent's patches, trying to explain why the resonance was low from the dev side:

Many if not most of these implemented features are at variance with Celestia's high scientific and professional design standards. No contact has been searched with the very experienced developers about how to implement such new features in a most general and versatile manner and about scientific aspects behind coding.

This is NOT how Celestia is usually developed and that's why the resonance was so low. We rather discuss with all our available expertise FIRST, how to implement new features in an optimal way, such that Celestia retains it's role as a general, most versatile framework rather than being degraded to a specialized application.

Just a few illustrations.

* The Info Text/Image feature
------------------------------------
It can be done in a much better, more general and quite different manner.

* New SBbc Hubble type declaration for the Milky way
-----------------------------------------------------------
I got all the code for a systematic extension of galaxy classifications beyond the simple Hubble scheme. With the new very economic PNG templates, the /full/ extended classification can easily be incorporated along with /custom/ galaxies. Doing just SBbc is certainly not Celestia "style" . It's just tedious to design all these templates to high graphical standards....Hi ElChristou

* New SBbc.pts model for the Milky Way
--------------------------------------------
Well .pts is completely outdated, merely vasting storage...

* New Galaxy color rendering (with a bit more saturation)
---------------------------------------------------

That's also no good, since my galaxy colors have been /computer/ mapped from Hubble true color photos and color perception is anyhow weak, "visually". The new PNG template format can carry RGB color (+alpha) naturally, if desired. Celestia has strict design standards close to a /visual/ perception of the Universe. No "free hand fiddling"! ...

* Improvement of comet tail rendering
---------------------------------------------
Increasing the number of points at best slows down things and is not a good approach.... The next step of comet display improvement should start at a much more basic level.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris agrees with me on all these mentioned points.
+++++++++++++++++++++++

Bye Fridger

[Paolo]

Fridger good to know this!
I can agree with you perhaps, some things done by Vincent should be impelemented better, or are already going to be developed better. But is also known that the dev team is almost a closed environment and there is a long time lack of active developers. He posted on the forums several months ago. Now he knows that ha has to use the developers mailing list.
Everithing that can shake the environment is welcome. If Vincent won't fork Celestia I think that he should be at least evaluated by you in the dev team as a possible future member.

When the version 1.4.2 pre 01?

[Paolo]

OT

Fridger your hype about Celestial matters is going to drive me crazy. I'm tuning several times per day. Did you attended to a course in advertising tecniques recently?

[t00fri]

Fridger good to know this!
I can agree with you many: things done by Vincent should be impelemented better, or are already going to be developed better. But is also known that the dev team is almost a closed environment and there is a long time lack of active developers.
So everithing that can shake the environment is welcome. If Vincent won't fork Celestia I think that he should be at least evaluated by you in the dev team as a possible future member.

When the version 1.4.2 pre 01?

Paolo,

admittely, Celestia's development is hampered on and off by "other activities" of it's developers . But it has NEVER been practice that --while time is short-- we adopt the "second best" solution for a planned new feature. Just to keep things moving. Soon or later one looses much of the good structure of a complex program like Celestia with such a practice.

Quite a few people know some C++ coding. But Celestia needs people with SOME high expertise somewhere BESIDES coding. This does not have to be science. It could be graphics design, tricky internationalization issues, expertise with specific toolkits, operating systems (MAC!) etc. And it needs people who value TEAMWORK rather than going their way all by themselves without communicating...

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

OT

Fridger your hype about Celestial matters is going to drive me crazy. I'm tuning several times per day. Did you attended to a course in advertising tecniques recently?

Good things take time...

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

Definitively we should all tx Fridger to take so much of his precious time (yes precious and much more than the time of anybody here IMO, no polemics please, it's only my opinion and I wanted to express it...) not only in dev on this project but also to speack for Chris explaining the fundamental aspect of Celestia basis...

So Fridger, TX once again.

I would really love to see somewhere (on the official site or in the forum) in evidence, written in gold letter what people should wait or not from the Celestia dev (from Celestia in general)... This would avoid the lost of so much time... (time which could be used in active dev of course... )

By declaring Celestia being a "space simulator", we create perhaps too much expectative, or wrong ones (IMO "space simulator" is pejorative in the case of Celestia); I think the authors should redefine what is the true nature of Celestia; a scientific database? a representation of the known universe? a simple representationof the facts? what is the real purpose of Celestia? Astronomical Encyclopedia?

This won't change anything on what people will want to add or do with Celestia, but at least things will be a much clear...

[Vincent]

Well, I don't know from where to start... Maybe I can say that I really don't mind whether the features Victor, DoctorJoe, Boux and I have added are integrated or not in the official release.... Once again, I spent all that time working on the code for my personnal use, and maybe I made a mistake sharing this with other users via the forum... I didn't know this had to be done via a 'fork' system...

I suppose this can be done to make everybody happy, on one hand Celestia (original, almost a scientific database), on the other Celestia "Edu", same soft + handy features for educational purposes; if this happen, it would be nice to merge both version in many ways,...

I completely agree with ElChristou here !

If something new will happen (e.g. a fork made by Vincent) it is welcome

Paolo, I also agree with some of your arguments, but I'm sorry, I don't think I have neither the programming skill nor the time to lead such a project... You know, we had a quite rude winter in Nancy, so I had a lot of time to discover Celestia's code and to work on it. But since I have a job, a wife and children, I'm afraid I won't be able to be as invested as I was during the last months... Maybe YOU could head this project...

No contact has been searched with the very experienced developers about how to implement such new features in a most general and versatile manner and about scientific aspects behind coding.

Sorry Fridger, even if I generally agree with your arguments, I think this is not entirely true. Here's a completely unanswered message Victor adressed to the official dev team 4 months ago:

I will try to implement all the suggestions I've received (mp3, pause, url,...), but before I even start, I want to ask a single question to the official celestia developers.

Is there any chance that someday celestia will have sound capabilities officially? (not necessarily my patch, of course...)

In other words: Which of these two paths should I take?
- I can make a code that will only be used by a couple of people, that requires the instalation of any 3rd party library, with specific features, etc....
- I can make a code more integrated with Celestia, using only a few (if any) GPL libraries, more generic, that can be used, if not direct, as a base for the official version of the sound code.

The first one is a lot easier to implement, so, if there will never be a sound code for celestia, I'd rather take that choice.

What do you say???

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 4&start=29

* The Info Text/Image feature
------------------------------------
It can be done in a much better, more general and quite different manner.

Well, my version is completely stable, doesn't decrease the fps rate, and was implemented following the same code as the infoURL feature. If official devs can do it nicer, that's great, but I can't see any problem with using this version while waiting for Chris' version.

* New SBbc Hubble type declaration for the Milky way
-----------------------------------------------------------
I got all the code for a systematic extension of galaxy classifications beyond the simple Hubble scheme. With the new very economic PNG templates, the /full/ extended classification can easily be incorporated along with /custom/ galaxies. Doing just SBbc is certainly not Celestia "style" .

* New SBbc.pts model for the Milky Way
--------------------------------------------
Well .pts is completely outdated, merely vasting storage...

Boux and I did that to improve the Milky Way templates (a lot of users were also asking for that) while waiting for the new galaxy rendering code. I'm really looking forward to using your new png templates/extended classification, that's why I wanted to wait for them before releasing the Celestia_patch2 version. But once again, where is the problem with using this version while waiting for your very promising version ???

* Improvement of comet tail rendering
---------------------------------------------
Increasing the number of points at best slows down things and is not a good approach.... The next step of comet display improvement should start at a much more basic level.

No fps drop were noticed even on old systems. And if that can be done in a better way, that's really a good thing. This improvement can be used while waiting for that improvement...

In conclusion, ElChristou's idea about creating an "Education" section in the forum seems the most interesting to me. And, Paolo, if you want to go further in your project of forking Celestia, I will be happy to contribute to it as well...

[t00fri]

Vincent,

I largely agree with your replies. I think this new 'forking' idea brought up again by Paolo, was in NO WAY particularly suggested by the "Edu" subcommunity here in this forum. Until Paolo's proposal of a fork, I saw your efforts largely as you described them above yourself: You were personally interested to implement some features into Celestia that also appeared useful for the "Edu people" here. So some nice and fruitful dialog keeps going along these lines among the people concerned. That's great, no doubt, and I have actually followed much of it.

The issue simply becomes more delicate as soon as voices arise requesting these patches to be implemented into the official distribution. At that point --and only there-- come our arguments that in many respects there are better solutions and that we usually do NOT implement the "second best ones" officially.

It is also not at all correct that Celestia development has essentially stopped again. I for my part am working VERY hard in my spare time on various projects that I have spelled out repeatedly. Also Chris has a few ambitious things in the works that will certainly overlap with your patches. Already now, there is his new code about a much better star display as well as the new code (and fixes) relaxing the requirements of /power-of-two/ sized textures in case of newer graphics cards.

ElChristou and I are collaborating intensively and have exchanged /hundreds/ of emails during the last months. Also the nice new 1.4.1 splash screen was a great and hard piece of work by ElChristou with lots of feedback from ALL developers!

ElChristou's and my joint project is concerned with the design of new high-quality PNG galaxy template sets of a new quality level! I am also exchanging /daily/ mails and intensive coding work with a Russian theoretical physicist about a great project to set up a matching set of fast, custom command-line programs for Windows,Linux,... that will allow people with "normal" computers to generate optimal 'monster' VT tile sets (<=128k, say) themselves in the HIGHEST possible quality! All they will need is enough space on their hard discs

++++++++++++++++
Notably there was also a serious error in the present (nm16) normal map code as applied (as usual) to /spherical/ bodies. So, ALL the normal maps on the Motherlode are actually badly incorrect near the poles. This has also been discussed with and accepted by Chris.
++++++++++++++++

What is true is that the development-related communication mostly went via private emails rather than the dev list. So I was also in regular contact with Chris during the recent weeks/months.

At this time, my suggestion is to just forget about Paolo's 'forking' proposal and be patient for another while. Some of you might well be surprised...

Bye Fridger

[steffens]

What is true is that the development-related communication mostly went via private emails rather than the dev list.

May I ask why? I rather enjoy to read something about the things currently in development. It's hard to pickup some real information from the increasingly boring and offtopic forun discussion.

steffens

[ElChristou]

What is true is that the development-related communication mostly went via private emails rather than the dev list.

May I ask why? I rather enjoy to read something about the things currently in development. It's hard to pickup some real information from the increasingly boring and offtopic forun discussion.

steffens

Yep, I also agree a bit more of transparency in the dev would be welcome...

[t00fri]

What is true is that the development-related communication mostly went via private emails rather than the dev list.

May I ask why? I rather enjoy to read something about the things currently in development. It's hard to pickup some real information from the increasingly boring and offtopic forun discussion.

steffens

Yeah, sorry about this. But it just happens at times. Usually such intensive email correspondence just starts up with a quite technical issue and then people just keep pushing "Reply" ...Sometimes also there is some intention not to expand a discussion topic too much. Since all incoming emails have to be answered, after all...

Bye Fridger

[Paolo]

I agree with Steffens and El Christou.

IMHO phpBB offers a lot more advantages than the developers mailing list (eg coherent formatting, immediate visibility, hystorical trace, better time coherence, search capabilities, later-edit and reorganization of posts).

phpBB offers the capability of giving permissions with high granularity both to users and to forums in order to control and limit the posting activitiy. http://www.phpbb.com/support/guide/#section3_1_2

So why not a new forum dedicated to the dev team, where everyone of us can read but only developers can post?

With this new forum everyone will be informed about the discussions behind the current development process. IMHO It should be quite interesting and formative for many of us in order to unveil the true complexity of the development activity.

We as users will continue to use and post on the current development forum that should remain as is. If something interesting will born in this forum should be discussed by the dev team in the new dedicated forum, like often happens now in the mailing list.

Kind regards

[t00fri]

I agree with Steffens and El Christou.

IMHO phpBB offers a lot more advantages than the developers mailing list
....

...like this very "entertaining" community of SEX bots and other Ferkels logging in daily

The SF dev list is completely void of ads, bots etc.

Bye Fridger

[Paolo]

I would really love to see somewhere (on the official site or in the forum) in evidence, written in gold letter what people should wait or not from the Celestia dev (from Celestia in general)... This would avoid the lost of so much time... (time which could be used in active dev of course... )

This is the one of the first things I've requested when I've joined these forums.
A ToDo list or better a road map with milestones. Several projects on sourceforge are using this approach. I think that it is something absolutely ESSENTIAL.

Like said by ElChristou even a simple list in a txt file placed somewhere (but updated) should cut and avoid the largest part of painful, unuseful and recurrent discussions in these forums.
For sure Chris has this list somewhere in his Hard Disk, every developer has something like this even written on a collection of post-it surrounding the monitor. Why not make this public? A version made from scratch should require an extremely little effort, perhaps 10 minutes? Of course including the time required for the upload!

But the more interesting side effect should be that it should allow to several volunteers with C++ experience to prepare effective patches that should allow to anticipate the official development, exploring different implementation approaches or that should try to fix BUGS!
All of this without significant additional cost in terms of time for the dev team, that at the end should even decide to discard completely a patch or to include its content as is in the official code.

Kind regards.

[Paolo]

I agree with Steffens and El Christou.

IMHO phpBB offers a lot more advantages than the developers mailing list
....

...like this very "entertaining" community of SEX bots and other Ferkels logging in daily

The SF dev list is completely void of ads, bots etc.

Bye Fridger

Fridger
Should sound as a point for you!
Bots can register, I don't think that should grab permissions by themselves.
Still several point of advantage for my suggestion!

Kind regards