Time Acceleration

[roger]

Is there any way currently (or planned) to allow celestia to increase or decrease time in anyting other that 10x increments?? there are times that at one level it would be nice to accelerate just a bit but another 10x acceleration is too much...

thanks in advance for any thoughts on this..

[Brendan]

It would be nice if the time increament could be chosen. Then we could do things like set the time increament to a planet's rotation period and watch the effect that the planet's orbital motion has on the positions of the stars as seen from the surface.

Brendan

[Harry]

The timescale can be set freely from within scripts. So you could write a script which changes timescale according to your needs, e.g. by entering the wanted timescale via keyboard.

For the observation of a planet's rotation etc. this won't really work. There is no fixed time increment because the time needed to render a frame varies - if Celestia takes 20ms to render a frame, the simulation time will advance 20ms * timescale.

But you can increment simulation time by a fixed amount using a script (surprised?). In fact, there is already such a script available at my Celestia-page, it's called timestepkeys_v1.1.celx.

It works by retrieving daylength etc. of the currently selected planet from a table (i.e. this only works with planets in our solarsystem), and then changing the time once per frame by one either one year (press "a"), one sideral day (press "s") or one solar day ("d"). Press shift and any of these keys to decrement time.

Harald