Celestia Forums

There's a nice comparison in Google Earth there :
http://www.barnabu.co.uk/page/7/

I'm now a bit worrying about Celestia vs Google Earth. GE is growing so fast, and its features set is now so impressive. Its community (and add-ons) is now extremelly large compared with Celestia's. Any thoughts on this ?

Money, money...

Why should Celestia try to compete with GoogleEarth? Celestia is intended to be an astronomical visualization tool, not a GIS tool.

It would be nice if Celestia could make use of some of the databases used by GoogleEarth, though, so people don't have to re-invent them.

selden wrote:Why should Celestia try to compete with GoogleEarth? Celestia is intended to be an astronomical visualization tool, not a GIS tool.

Exactly.

It would be nice if Celestia could make use of some of the databases used by GoogleEarth, though, so people don't have to re-invent them.

I've looked at Google Earth's KML file format a little bit. It would be quite a lot of work to support everything in KML files, but not overwhelmingly difficult to support some key features. Partial support for KML files could generate a lot of frustration when some certain features didn't work; choosing a concisely describable subset of features might mitigate this problem (e.g. "Placemarks are the only KML entities recognized.)

An important feature of Google Earth is that it's very simple to install add-ons: you just click on a kmz file and it appears in the list of installed items. It should be this easy to install an add-on in Celestia, too.

--Chris

Although GE looks impressive, as far as I know, it still does not allow one to view almost any object in the Universe...
How can there be any comparison?

selden wrote:Why should Celestia try to compete with GoogleEarth? Celestia is intended to be an astronomical visualization tool, not a GIS tool.
....

Selden,

strictly speaking, you are correct of course. Yet in a more general context, there are a number of features that are up for comparison: like the ease and handling of 3d navigation, the smoothness of generating 3d terrain on the fly, patching textures quickly together etc. Altogether I could enumerate a number of features in GE that would make a VERY good show in Celestia and make me a little envious...

Fridger

t00fri wrote:...there are a number of features that are up for comparison: like the ease and handling of 3d navigation...

Any interest in discussing this point in a specific thread for eventually work on some modif of Celestia?

I don?t like GE very much.It?s very unstable in my configuration.I put a certain number of models and then the program lock down.If I desinstall,reinstall,but not uninstall the models,the problem remains.It?s very annoying...