Celestia Forums

Many people have produced enormous datasets for such things as asteroids, galaxies, and artificial satellites, which, if used, tend to bog Celestia down even when running on good modern hardware. These datasets are useful and interesting, but you usually don't want to run with them all the time, and currently enabling and disabling them is an awkward matter of renaming files.

It seems to me that part of the solution is a much finer-grained user interface for object visibility: such objects should be grouped into classes that can be turned on and off individually from within the user interface. Usually you don't want to see the whole Globalstar and Iridium constellations, but you might not want to turn off spacecraft rendering just to get rid of them.

Ideally we could have some means by which add-on files could themselves register new groups of a certain type, and it would be possible to switch those groups on or off from within the UI.

Well, now I suppose this suggestion is getting rather ambitious, and I imagine that others have proposed similar things... the trick is striking a balance between flexibility and simplicity for whatever scheme gets adopted.

Something like this would be an excellent idea . . . I can imagine one way that it might work. Objects could have a field called group; all the Iridium satellites could contain the line:

Group "Iridium constellation"

Groups would be registered automatically when loading .ssc files, and a dialog box for selecting which groups to display would be available when running Celestia. Ideally, the list of active groups would be saved and restored between Celestia sessions.

A scheme like this would not be too difficult to implement . . . It's not quite a complete solution though. It'd also be nice to be able to load .ssc files on the fly. Something like Bruckner's 7000 asteroid catalog is best not even loaded unless necessary.

--Chris