Celestia Forums

Chris, would it be posible to add a feature where you could set the distance away from a planet, when you select "goto".
and maybe it could be a toggle, from (Current) default settings, or your own set distance away.

This would make it much easyer to see the difference in planet sizes.

I know this can be done with the split screen feature.
But it would be nice to be able to set the distance.


Oooh! and one other thing.
could we have "Goto Surface" put into the Right click context menu selection ?

Paul:
Why not use "Goto Object ..." off the Navigation menu?
You can set a latitude, longitude and distance in kilometres, AU or object radii.

Grant

I know i can do these things grant.

But what i meen is, that i would like to be able to visit each planet one after the other.
and the distance away from each planet would be the same.
so a smaller planet like pluto would not take up the whole screen, but Jupiter would.

But at the moment, whenever i goto a planet they all looks the same size.
because Celestia adjusts the distance to make the planet fill up the same screen space.

So i would like to be able to toggle between letting Celestia adjust the distance, or Locking it to a set distance.

You can do the whole sequence with a script, like the 'demo.cel' does:

goto { time <t> distance <d> upframe "<orientation>" }


example:

goto { time 20 distance 10 upframe "equatorial" }


The distance parameter is expressed in terms of planet's radius, so you have to calculate it with respect to each planet to achieve the same distance.

Another feature that should be assimilated to the request in this thread and for me should be interesting is the capability of placing the obserber in some orbital significant point like geostationary orbits or lagrangian points.

Bye - Paolo

Darkmiss wrote:I know i can do these things grant.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that you were daft - I really was just wondered what was wrong with the option I suggested. It takes about five seconds to set up, and given that this sounds like something of a one-off interest, it seemed like the easiest way to go about it, rather than needing any new code from Chris.

Grant

One thing to realize is that many of these requests for "special features" can now be satisfied by people writing either .CEL or .CELX (Lua) scripts as addons.

Personally, I think I'd like to see a menu added to the GUI to which a user could add items associated with scripts (saving the time needed to hunt through the script file browser that's provided in the File menu) plus the ability to tie function keys to those scripts.

selden wrote:One thing to realize is that many of these requests for "special features" can now be satisfied by people writing either .CEL or .CELX (Lua) scripts as addons.

Personally, I think I'd like to see a menu added to the GUI to which a user could add items associated with scripts (saving the time needed to hunt through the script file browser that's provided in the File menu) plus the ability to tie function keys to those scripts.

This is a very good idea . . . I believe that shift- and ctrl- function keys are still available

I've also been thinking that it might be nice to allow object-specific scripts in the context menu. For example, an add-on could have a 'volcanoes of Mars' tour that you could start by right clicking on Mars on selecting the appropriate submenu item. Or is this all just getting completely out of hand?

--Chris

Chris,

I have a minor problem with adding a lot of stuff only to the context menu: it turns Celestia into a game of hide-and-seek. Some people enjoy that kind of thing, but others find it quite frustrating. Having to click on every possible object just to see if it might have a script associated to it can be very time consuming.

I think I'd prefer to see adding such scripts as an extension to the "Navigation/Tour Guide" menu instead or in addition to the context menu.

Selden

I think that Chris, like the most of the programmers elaborates their strategies making a balance between the difficulties and the fastness of the implementation.

As you probably had noticed the main menu and all the aspects related with the UI are subject to minor changes in time through the new versions. A lot of new and sometimes obscure shortcuts are added often but a lot of them hasn't a corresponding command in the user interface. So seems that some kind of unwillingness is associated to this kind of UI implementation.

The reason is that those kind of changes are somewhat complex, time expensive and involve a tedious work. Forthermore you have to consider that these changes must be ported to all the other actually supported platforms (4-5, more?), so the work should be multiplied.

Your request should be implemented easly with a completely dynamic runtime generated UI.

Those are some of the reasons because I've proposed in a Poll in this forum: a unique UI based upon OpenGL and independent from the platform. In my website there are some other suggestions. But that poll was practically unnoticed.

Bye-Paolo

Paolo wrote:Those are some of the reasons because I've proposed in a Poll in this forum: a unique UI based upon OpenGL and independent from the platform. In my website there are some other suggestions. But that poll was practically unnoticed.

The thing is that since we have different people supporting and maintaining the different UI, I'm not sure we would gain much by having only one, except in consistency. And we would have to re-implement many things which are 'free' when using an existing toolkit.

Game companies don't have that problem since they can implement their own OpenGL toolkit once and reuse it in all their games, developping one for just one program would be a major task. However maybe a free (opensource) OpenGL toolkit exists already?

To Christophe

Consistency is the first and the most important of the advantages that I've mentioned in my website. http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/pangeli70/My%20Celestia/FR1%20Multiplatform%20UI.htm.

I agree with you that developing an OGL interface should involve an initial considerable work, but I think that all the other advantages like native multiplatform multilanguage support and speedup in cross platform development will make the development team to consider this opportunity.

The objective is not to recreate WinXP GUI using OGL.
A very basic UI like the one that I've suggested in my website: http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/pangeli70/My%20Celestia/FR4%20UI%20proposal.htm should be sufficent.

I've implemented a more complex one with Deplhi and DirectX 5 about three years ago. I'am a programmer amateur, so if I did it I think that you will be able to do this quite easily.

Bye - Paolo

The problem is that it's not just popups and menus that are needed.

Here are screenshots of the dialogs used in the KDE version. We have toolbars, sliders, spin boxes, combo boxes, tree views, editable tables, etc... That's why I think a pure OpenGL version is doable only if we can use an existing OpenGL toolkit.

Is there an OpenGL toolkit of widgets out there? It sounds like a great idea Paolo. I'm going to have a look for one.

Those screenshots of the OGL UI are they real?
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/pangeli ... 20menu.jpg

later..
I had a google and Plib looks promising, especially this library.
http://plib.sourceforge.net/pui/index.html
Although it might be too much work for celestia, it will be great for my project (if I get that far)

To Marc

Those screenshots of the OGL UI are they real?
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/pangeli ... 20menu.jpg

Unfortunately no. I did them with Corel Draw. Using Delphi should not be a great problem, but C++ is not my favourite.

Other sites with GUI toolkits are the following.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/7184/guitool.html
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Graphics/Libraries/OpenGL/Add-on_Libraries/

Some of them look like interesting like Fresco, GLOW and GLUI. But this is not my point. All of them look dull and anonymous.

Bye-Paolo

Thanks for the links Paolo.

To Christophe

Here are screenshots of the dialogs used in the KDE version. We have toolbars, sliders, spin boxes, combo boxes, tree views, editable tables, etc... That's why I think a pure OpenGL version is doable only if we can use an existing OpenGL toolkit.

Aaaaaaarghhhhhh! Why the Celestia shots are in French???? Under Linux is it possible to switch the language at runtime?

BTW the UI for the KDE platform looks nice and somewhat more complete than the Windows one. The customization capabilities for the keyboard shortcut looks amazing.

Do you think that a multiplatform UI will be implemented sooner or later or will remain only a dream?

Bye Paolo

Paolo wrote:Aaaaaaarghhhhhh! 8O Why the Celestia shots are in French???? Under Linux is it possible to switch the language at runtime?

Yes, I should have switched back to English before doing the screenshots. At least that shows that i18n is already a reality for linux users.

Paolo wrote:BTW the UI for the KDE platform looks nice and somewhat more complete than the Windows one. The customization capabilities for the keyboard shortcut looks amazing.

Thanks, that's because KDE/Qt is more modern and higher level than the MFCs which are starting to show their age (about 10 years). Development is faster and a lot easier on KDE than on Windows. For example the toolbar and shortcut customizations come 'free' and the menus are a simple XML file. Maybe with .Net things will change...

Paolo wrote:Do you think that a multiplatform UI will be implemented sooner or later or will remain only a dream?

I think a multiplatform UI can become a reality, but I see it being developed with Qt or wxWindow rather than with a pure OpenGL toolkit which don't look really mature. For the time being the problem with Qt is that there is no GPL version for Windows, otherwise I would already have started a pure Qt version.

Paolo wrote:To Christophe

Here are screenshots of the dialogs used in the KDE version. We have toolbars, sliders, spin boxes, combo boxes, tree views, editable tables, etc... That's why I think a pure OpenGL version is doable only if we can use an existing OpenGL toolkit.

Aaaaaaarghhhhhh! Why the Celestia shots are in French???? Under Linux is it possible to switch the language at runtime?

BTW the UI for the KDE platform looks nice and somewhat more complete than the Windows one. The customization capabilities for the keyboard shortcut looks amazing.

Do you think that a multiplatform UI will be implemented sooner or later or will remain only a dream?

Bye Paolo

Paolo, believe me, the Celestia developers have extensively discussed the issue of (available) cross-platform toolkits versus platform specific ones about a year ago at an early stage of Celestia development. The pro's and con's have been carefully taken into acount.

Your platform-independent UI idea is neither new nor really ?ompetitive at this time.

Bye Fridger

To Fridger

Unfortunately I've lost the discussion you've mentioned, probably I've met Celestia when it was finished. Haven't ever heard anything about this question I thought that was appropriate to underline this point.

No problem , I hope I haven't annoyed you with my small campaign for the UI unification.

I trust in all the development team that will solve this issue, making a very good job like the one that is in progress for the location management. I'll wait eagerly.

Thank you Fridger and Christophe for your answers . As soon as possible I'll update my website with your informations.

Bye - Paolo