Celestia Forums

Hi folks, new to the forum.

I've just started looking at Celestia in anger as I'm, starting to work up to designing anew sci-fi universe (more for kicks than anything concrete at the moment) and Celestia seems like a superlative place to do the map on. Beats the hack out of my original 2D map idea...My current plan is to start from fairly close to real (e.g. only adding planets to stars which we currently suspect have them.)

That said, I'm more-or-less completely new at this sort of stuff. I've worked my way through what documentation I can find. I have tried the 'add a new texture to a star tutorial', but failed to get it work. No idea why... However, that was merely a (failed!) attempt to experiment with the system. I've managed to slap down a new planet at any rate (albeit with next-to-no understanding of the orbital stuff at this point!)

Now, this brings me to my next question. Is it possible to rename objects? As in, could I, for totally random absurd example, take ESP Eri and rename it to, I don't know, Flibblestar and rename EPS Eri b and c to Flibbleworld I and II, entirely populated by homicidal penguin handpuppets? I tried a modify command in the ssc, but that didn't seem to do anything to modify the name.

If not, I assume the only solution would be to make the objects in question invisible and place new objects on top of them. So, for the planets in particular, how do I go about extracting the relevant data?

Or should I just hide the existant planetary systems and make new ones up and not try to be too clever at this stage?

Stars and their names are defined in STC files, not in SSC files.
Modify for Stars will be in v1.6.

It'd probably be better to define your own Star when creating a fictitious planetary system, since more and more real planets are being found around real stars and might conflict with yours.

selden wrote:Stars and their names are defined in STC files, not in SSC files.

I got that much. No idea why I couldn't do the tutorial texture change. Not a priority though, it's not something I really want or need to do anyway.

selden wrote:Modify for Stars will be in v1.6.

Okay.

selden wrote:It'd probably be better to define your own Star when creating a fictitious planetary system, since more and more real planets are being found around real stars and might conflict with yours.

That kinda defeats the whole point of what I was trying to do, which was play in as close to the real universe as possible. As opposed to what my normal universe is, which is almost entirely made up as I go along. (Heck, we don't even have a map!)

What about renaming planets? That's what I really want to do (star names are kinds low priority, since the point was to be using real stars anyway!) If I can rename planets, then I'm really set, since I can just mod where the actual planets are. With a bit of artistic license.

I'm in no particular hurry at this point...I've otherwise got as far as defining FTL travel rules nominally and that's about it. If I have to wait until 1.6 whenever that is to rename objects, then I'll wait.

Since you insist... Celestia v1.5.1 will let you rename Stars if you specify the HIP index number. The procedure is described in the Celestia WikiBook at
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/S ... ming_Stars

As you wrote originally, one can essentially eliminate existing planets by creating an SSC file which contains
Modify "planet" "star" { Class "invisible"}

Replacing "planet" and "star" by their actual identifiers.
e.g.
Modify "b" "HIP 57087" { Class "invisible"}
Since you're planning to change the textual names, you should avoid ambiguities by using the HIP identifier, which can't be changed for pre-defined stars.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "how do I go about extracting the relevant data?"

The parameters that define the orbital and other characteristics of Celestia's default planets are in the SSC files which are in Celestia's /data/ directory. You can cut-and-paste those parameters into your own SSC files.

Brilliant. Thanks. The tutorial I was reading earlier suggested that digging out the data from the files was less than easy, when in fact all I had to do was open it in Wordpad instead of notepad and it's then easy. Stars.dat is another matter, mind... I used the stellar data in the stars.txt in the tutorial for that data and that seems to work this time around; I was able to change the star texture and name. (Not that I especially wanted to, but at least now I know I can do it!)

Tried everything again and this time it worked perfectly. Go figure. Thanks again!