Celestia 1.5.0 prerelease 1
Posted: 05.12.2006, 08:42
The first of the prerelease builds of Celestia 1.5.0 is ready. As usual, this is a Windows binary package. For the time being, Linux and Mac OS X users should sync with the CVS tree and compile the source. I will try to have a Mac OS X binary for 1.5.0pre1 ready soon.
You may download the self-installing package here:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... .0pre1.exe
All of the major new features for 1.5.0 are in the prerelease. Nearly all of the work for the final 1.5.0 will consist of bug fixes and some performance tuning. There are some known bugs with star rendering and cloud shadows, and some work on the new atmosphere code still remains. You should only install 1.5.0pre1 if you need or want to test out the new features; otherwise, it's best to stick with 1.4.1.
Here is the 1.5.0 change log so far, with changes categorized for readability:
--Chris
You may download the self-installing package here:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... .0pre1.exe
All of the major new features for 1.5.0 are in the prerelease. Nearly all of the work for the final 1.5.0 will consist of bug fixes and some performance tuning. There are some known bugs with star rendering and cloud shadows, and some work on the new atmosphere code still remains. You should only install 1.5.0pre1 if you need or want to test out the new features; otherwise, it's best to stick with 1.4.1.
Here is the 1.5.0 change log so far, with changes categorized for readability:
Code: Select all
Rendering:
* Improved rendering of meshes in OpenGL 2.0 render path:
- Switched to local viewer model for better quality specular highlights
- Added support for specular and normal maps for meshes
- Enable rendering of eclipse shadows cast onto meshes
* Enabled per-pixel specular lighting in OpenGL 2.0 path
* Made specular lighting work properly with normal maps
* Enabled separate specular color when rendering models in pre OpenGL 2.0
render paths
* Implemented cloud shadows
* Changed eclipse shadow shaders to use a single interpolant for all
shadows instead of one per shadow
* Made OpenGL 2.0 render path respect the ring shadow render flag setting
* Improved atmosphere rendering in OpenGL 2.0 path; uses new ssc parameters
to specify scattering and absorption coefficients
* Added Lunar-Lambert photometric model (linear combination of Lambert and
Lommel-Seeliger) for much more realistic appearing dusty objects
(e.g. the Moon)
* Added normal maps for cloud layers
* Allow smaller objects to cast eclipse shadows (e.g. can now see eclipse
shadows from Miranda on Uranus)
* Added dynamic star labeling
* Made star orbit paths visible
* Added support for compressed normal maps (DXT5nm)
* Enabled new star rendering path: uses point sprite extension, new Gaussian
glare textures
* Made overlay textures work in GLSL path
* Added support for non-power-of-two textures (newer graphics cards only;
on older cards the textures will be automatically rescaled to the nearest
power of two.)
Galaxies:
-changed galaxy template format to standard (grayscale) PNG
-allow a custom template for each galaxy in deepsky.dsc
-new approach to thickness of galaxy (arms): assumed proportional to read-in
brightness values
-emulate dust lanes around galactic plane (y=0)
-considerable improvement of Milky Way appearance as seen from Earth
-implement galaxy labels of transparency increasing with distance, thus
providing a neat 3d effect
- Galaxy templates:
- designed an entirely new set of PNG templates using a uniform multi-layer
technique
- provided a custom Milky Way template including all known arms with
correct location of the Sun. Supply adapted deepsky.dsc
New depth sorting:
* Fixed some depth sorting problems: coalescing of depth buckets was failing
when a merged object was clipped to the new plane.
* Implemented a new depth sorting algorithm that fixes many depth sorting
bugs.
* Rewrote orbit path rendering; orbits are now properly depth sorted
Trajectories and reference frames:
* Added SpiceOrbit interface for trajectories defined in SPICE kernel files
* Improved custom orbits based on JPL ephemerides:
- Support big endian platforms
- Fixed Moon orbit
- Added orbits for Earth-Moon barycenter and sun
- Added heliocentric and solar system barycentric orbits
- Added Moon and Earth orbits relative to Earth-Moon barycenter
- Guarded against crash when the JPL ephemeris file can't be found
* Generalized rotations
- Clear syntax for ssc files
- UniformRotation
- PrecessingOrientation
- SampledOrientation - interpolated sequence of quaternion key frames
* Added new solar system object type ReferencePoint, for defining reference
frame centers.
* Script interfaces for orbits and rotation models (ScriptedOrbit and
ScriptedRotation)
* Added generalized reference frames for positioning and orienting bodies
- J2000 ecliptic
- J2000 equator
- Body-fixed
- Body mean equator (with optional freeze epoch)
- Two-vector (relative position, relative velocity, constant vectors)
* Added FixedPosition trajectory type for making an object stationary within
its reference frame
* Added FixedRotation rotation model
* Added VSOP87 CustomOrbit for the Sun about the solar system barycenter
Accuracy:
* Established Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB) as the time scale used
internally by Celestia
- Convert to UTC when displaying the time
- Modified Set Time dialog to convert from UTC to TDB
* Moved origin of coordinate system to the solar system barycenter
* Corrected kilometers per light year constant
Internationalization:
* New translations: Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Chinese, Korean
* Updated other translations
* Separate i18n domain for constellation names
* Windows: Added support for i18n
* Fixed bugs with UTF-8 in object name completion
* I18n improvements and bug fixes for Mac OS X
* Localized planet labels
* Mac: added Japanese translation
* Modified eclipse finder dialog for i18n
* Display a '?' when glyph is not found in a font texture
* COPYING, controls.txt, start script, and guide can all be localized
Scripting:
* Implemented event handlers for celx scripts
* cel and celx scripting:
- added openclusters and cloudshadows render flags
- added location, nebulae, openclusers, and i18nconsteallations label flags
* New celx scripting commands:
- utctotdb and tdbtoutc
- gl commands for rendering
* Lua hooks for script extensions to Celestia
* Script interfaces for orbits and rotation models (ScriptedOrbit and
ScriptedRotation)
* Support Lua 5.1 (5.0 compatibility retained)
* Made celestia:loadtexture use relative file names
UI:
* Added a ReverseMouseWheel option for configuration file
Catalog files:
* Made relative InfoURL relative to current add-on directory instead of main
data directory.
* Updates to parser:
- Allow leading + (no effect, just symmetry with - )
- Allow numbers to begin with a decimal point (e.g. accept .12 as well
as 0.12)
* Accelerated loading of large catalog files with an improved name index
(over 100x performance increase for 100k+ object catalogs)
Meshes:
* Added logging of mesh statistics
* Improved load time mesh conditioning: eliminated duplicate materials and
sort submeshes by material to reduce graphics state changes.
* Fixed bad calculation of specular exponent when converting materials from
3DS files.
Data file updates:
* New extrasolar planets:
- XO-1
- HD 69830 system
- HD 164922 b, HD 66428 b, HD 99109 b, HD 107148 b, HIP 14810 b
- HIP 14810 c, HD 185269 b, Gliese 849 b
- Mu Ara e
* Added stars for new extrasolar planets: GSC 92941-01657
* Revised orbits of many extrasolar planets to reflect new data
* Added Plutonian satellite names: S/2005 P1 -> Hydra, S/2005 P2 -> Nix
* Added 9 new numbered Saturnian satellites
* New RECONS data added to nearstars.stc
* Added moons Daphnis, Perdita, Mab, and Cupid to numberedmoons.ssc
* Switch to barycentric definition for Pluto system
* Use J2000 equator for Moon's reference frame (instead of equator of date;
allows precession to be included for Earth's rotation.)
* Added asteroid RGB colors integrated from spectra
* Replaced Hubble Space Telescope made with Cham's much improved version
* Switched to improved version of Cassini model from Cham
Miscellaneous bug fixes:
* Fixed bug that caused time scale in celestiacore and simulation to get out
of sync.
* Fixed bug in eclipse shadow test; objects close to the surface of the lit
side of a planet were incorrectly rendered with shadows
* Fixed a bug in the octree culling code that was causing star culling errors
* Fixed ambient light in OpenGL 2.0 render path to match other render paths
* Fixed bug that causes locations to work improperly in multi-star systems
* Improved vecToVec rotation and quaternion-to-matrix functions
Tools:
* Added cmodsphere, a utility for producing cmod meshes from height samples
regularly spaced in longitude and latitude.
* Added spectrum2rgb tool for generating RGB asteroid colors from SMASS
spectra
Miscellaneous platform-specific changes:
Mac OS X:
* Mac: Show menu bar when moving mouse to top of screen in full screen
* Mac: added missing 'Hide Others' menu option
* Mac: cursor now changes on draggable view boundaries
* Mac: middle mouse button implemented (option-click on one button mice)
* Mac: show nearest and brightest stars properly sorted in star browser
* Mac: enabled support for hardware antialiasing
Linux:
* KDE and GTK: added ogg/theora video capture
* Fixed bug in cmod loader that caused binary cmod files to be read
incorrectly on 64-bit machines.
* KDE: removed a dependency on STL support in Qt
* Fixed gcc 4.1.1 build errors caused by bad constructor declarations in Star
and CommandGotoLongLat classes
* KDE: improvements to popup menu--orbiting bodies are now sorted by type
* KDE: accept relative dir/files in --conf, --dir, and --extrasdir command
line options
* KDE: fixed by ing deep sky objects info url where the default url was
always used.
Windows:
* Windows: generate an accelerate command only when the 'a' key is pressed
without any modifiers.
--Chris
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