Celestia Forums

I would like to use Celestia in some planetarium presentations that I'm going to be doing in the fall (we have a computer with a projector that projects onto the dome) and I was thinking:

It kind of 'ruins the mood' if you're flying around in space and want to show something that requires a windows menu to pop up in the middle of your view, so I was thinking of possible work-arounds.

Firstly, do you think we could have hotkeys for inter-system travel? I was thinking that the number keys 0-9 could be used to select or select-and-goto the major planets in a solar system, or something like that.

Secondly, I think someone mentioned the idea of a waypoint system in another post. I think this would be great, a sort of a "build your own demo" thing (and now that I say that I get the feeling I'm not the first to come up with it...). It would be cool if you could, say, que up a list of targets and then every time a certain key is pressed the camera goes to whatever is next in the list, or possibly a timed auto-goto. A way to save your "demos" would be great too, of course.

hotkeys are already there in some form. For instance

1 = Mercury
2 = Venus
3 = earth, etc

so try this

Hit the number of the planet you want to go to then just hit 'G' key which will activate the goto feature.

So if you hit '5' then 'G' you will goto Jupiter. You can also type in the selected destination using the enter key.

Hit 'enter' then type 'hubble' and 'enter again. Then type 'G' and you will go to the hubble telescope

Take a look at the file "demo.cel". This file defines the demo program.
It's an ascii text file and the syntax is pretty simple to figure out.

- Hank

Ok, note to self: Next time, make sure a feature isn't already implemented before requesting it (the 0-9 option works for extrasolar planets too, btw).

There's still the idea of having a hot-key that advances the demo to the next step rather than have each be timed, however. That would still prove useful. Perhaps a line could be added to the demo.cel like "wait { keyboard s }" or something like that?