Celestia Forums

There's a new Celestia prerelease for Windows:

http://www.spacesim.net/prerelease/cele ... .2pre5.exe

You can get just the EXE as well, but it's missing the new models for Amalthea, Phobos, Deimos, and Hyperion:

http://www.spacesim.net/prerelease/cele ... e5-exe.zip

--Chris

Hey, thanks Chris.

Boy, you sure are putting them out this year.

I hadn't gotten finished setting up Pre4 yet.

Take care, Bob

Hi Chris,

thanks for the new release.
I`ve found that the Starbrowser show`s no Startyp`s anymore. Is this a bug??
The other question: is rassilons code of showing stars implemented like in this tread: ? http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4028

Thanks for all your hard work!

Commander David wrote:Hi Chris,

thanks for the new release.
I`ve found that the Starbrowser show`s no Startyp`s anymore. Is this a bug??

Yes, it's a bug--thanks for catching this one! I very much suspect that moving to the Visual C++ 7.0 compiler is what caused this problem, as there were no modifcations made to the star browser in over a month. I committed a workaround to CVS, and the fix will be in the next prerelease. Hopefully, Don didn't even get a chance to enter this one in the bug database on SourceForge.

--Chris

Hey Chris -- you're working FTL! You got it fixed before "the bugman" even knew it existed. Great work Chris!

Sorry to keep going on about it, but I don't suppose there's any news on whether it'd be possible to allow Celestia to start up without loading stars.dat (ie have a blank universe on startup, which one fills with .stc files).

I've asked about it several times before but have heard no response from any of the programmers about this (we tried editing the stars.dat file down to no stars and it just crashes, but other than that I still don't know if it can be made to work), so I don't even know if the request is just impossible, is being ignored or not noticed, is on the waiting list of things to do, is being worked on, or anything else. If someone could please let me know the status of the request then I'll gladly shut up about it...

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:Sorry to keep going on about it, but I don't suppose there's any news on whether it'd be possible to allow Celestia to start up without loading stars.dat (ie have a blank universe on startup, which one fills with .stc files).

Sorry this has taken so long despite your frequent requests . . .

A non-existent or empty stars.dat is a boundary case that Celestia should handle properly. So, I just committed a change that allows you to eliminate the StarDatabase line from celestia.cfg and launch Celestia without a binary star database. If you leave the StarDatabase line there and just delete stars.dat, Celestia will still complain. This behavior is so that someone who accidentally deletes or renames their stars.dat file will receive notification that something's wrong.

I'll get a prerelease with this fix built within a day or so . . . Private message me if you need a drop earlier.
--Chris

chris wrote:Sorry this has taken so long despite your frequent requests . . .

No worries. I just didn't know whether it had been noted or not.

A non-existent or empty stars.dat is a boundary case that Celestia should handle properly. So, I just committed a change that allows you to eliminate the StarDatabase line from celestia.cfg and launch Celestia without a binary star database. If you leave the StarDatabase line there and just delete stars.dat, Celestia will still complain. This behavior is so that someone who accidentally deletes or renames their stars.dat file will receive notification that something's wrong.

So to remove the stars.dat file one would do by editing it out of the .cfg, not by actually deleting/renaming it? That sounds good to me .

Nothing else in Celestia should be affected by the lack of a preloaded stars.dat, should it?

I'll get a prerelease with this fix built within a day or so . . . Private message me if you need a drop earlier.

Thanks for getting back to me on this!

I just installed this new release (I was still on 1.3.0!) and it does look very nice... In fact... what did you do with it?! It seems to be running about a zillion times faster now!