Look up or look down?
Posted: 25.07.2003, 23:27
Hi everyone,
I've just been reading the post over in textures, "better than big blue", and it made me realise that there is perhaps an emerging divergence of hopes and expectations for Celestia. As Don expresses, Celestia was intended as a space exploration simulator; the desire for ever increasing resolutions of planetary surfaces,particularly Earth, could be seen as a branching off from this objective, which may take the program too far from its purpose, and perhaps spoil it.
This raises some interesting points.I'm a fan of high resolution, it's great to be able to zoom in, disappointing somehow when it runs out into fuzziness. Surely, space itself is not that interesting unless you're into the physics of it, the whole point of all space exploration is to traverse space, either physically, or by detecting emissions that have crossed space and are perceptable to us, and see what's on the other side of it, preferably in as much detail as possible.What is available to explore using Celestia diminishes in detail, as you move away from Earth, although the nebulae and so on are very pretty, obviously we have more visual information about the regions closest to us. I don't see any conflict in the objectives of actual space exploration, but in the sense of the abilities of Celestia (and graphics cards) being able to represent close-up detail, I can see how difficulties arise.I hope the zoom in tiling engine does come together. Hopefully,looking up and looking down can both be eventually accommodated, possibly with some sort of program within a program,or selectable option. In fact there was a thread suggesting a micro celestia that enabled exploration of the world of sub-atomic particles, unfortunately this would seem to be less realistic than the planetary/stellar scale of representation, as particles etc are not little balls, and don't obey Sir Isaac.I remember at the end of the film "Men In Black" there is a sequence that pans right out from the last scene to where our entire Universe is a little ball ,the plaything of a meta creature, it would be great to be able to be able to see somthing like that. Thought provoking stuff indeed!
regards ziggy.
I've just been reading the post over in textures, "better than big blue", and it made me realise that there is perhaps an emerging divergence of hopes and expectations for Celestia. As Don expresses, Celestia was intended as a space exploration simulator; the desire for ever increasing resolutions of planetary surfaces,particularly Earth, could be seen as a branching off from this objective, which may take the program too far from its purpose, and perhaps spoil it.
This raises some interesting points.I'm a fan of high resolution, it's great to be able to zoom in, disappointing somehow when it runs out into fuzziness. Surely, space itself is not that interesting unless you're into the physics of it, the whole point of all space exploration is to traverse space, either physically, or by detecting emissions that have crossed space and are perceptable to us, and see what's on the other side of it, preferably in as much detail as possible.What is available to explore using Celestia diminishes in detail, as you move away from Earth, although the nebulae and so on are very pretty, obviously we have more visual information about the regions closest to us. I don't see any conflict in the objectives of actual space exploration, but in the sense of the abilities of Celestia (and graphics cards) being able to represent close-up detail, I can see how difficulties arise.I hope the zoom in tiling engine does come together. Hopefully,looking up and looking down can both be eventually accommodated, possibly with some sort of program within a program,or selectable option. In fact there was a thread suggesting a micro celestia that enabled exploration of the world of sub-atomic particles, unfortunately this would seem to be less realistic than the planetary/stellar scale of representation, as particles etc are not little balls, and don't obey Sir Isaac.I remember at the end of the film "Men In Black" there is a sequence that pans right out from the last scene to where our entire Universe is a little ball ,the plaything of a meta creature, it would be great to be able to be able to see somthing like that. Thought provoking stuff indeed!
regards ziggy.
"Thought provoking" indeed!
The idea that Celestia is in fact open-source and allows third-party add-ons and spin-offs should be enough for any programmer who would want to do the things you (and others) have mentioned, like looking down, being -on- the surface (not just at 0 meters) and be able to look around (like SimCity), someone else mentioned a 3-D program that creates entire worlds (on the surface), and you mention sub-atomic simulation.
This is all possible today! Right now! All that is needed is one or more programmers with lots of spare time on their hands who are willing to make it a reality (analysis, design, coding, testing, etc.) <smile>. Then, release it as a Celestia add-on, spin-off, or whatever they like.
So, the question becomes ... do Celestia users want the program to become an Earth-based, solar-system-wide SimCity -- or would they rather have options like using different gases, color-enhancement, or other "filters" to view deep space objects, like Hubble/NASA makes them look? And lots of other "space-exploration" options and functions?
One thing we need to keep in our "end-user" minds (we're not programmers on this team), is that Chis is only one person. It looks like there are 2 or 3 others that are somewhat active (Christophe, Fridger, others I don't know yet?), while others come and go. With a cast of many on-the-side folks creating add-ons, documenting how to do/use different things in Celestia, etc.
For a program as complex as Celestia is, to only have three (3) developers and to get it as far as they have, in such a short time (one or two years?), is an amazing accomplishment. Programming a computer is not easy, let alone a 3-D, Real-Time simulation -- but this team makes it look easy, which makes users want more and more, sooner and sooner! 
I know because I was a programmer (and analyst, and designer, and all sorts of other DP/IT things) for 23 years.