Celestia MUST NOT die - some very personal notes
Posted: 23.11.2005, 10:03
Hi all here,
I watched out for some time the discussion about Chris' disapperance and how the development of Celestia can go on in the mean time. And I want to give some very personal thoughts here, about Celestia, what's its meaning for me. Nothing technical but philosophical. Watching out for the Stars is philosophy.
I'm not young but born in the 60ies. A child of the "Star Trek" generation, and of course I was fascinated about spaceflight (and lasers and more). I saw the first moon landing live in TV.
When it came to computers small enough to have it at home OF COURSE I wondered if there could be some kind of space simulation running on it. I dreamed of something which today really exists - CELESTIA!
Those were the days of the legendary Apple ][ compatibles (I had one). Later, the first PC/XT compatibles had more power (a note for those of you who are born later: we talk about an 8086 processor running 4.77 MHz and 512kB RAM - YES, that's MEGAHertz and KILObytes).
On that PC, we (a friend and I) tried to get graphics stuff running. It was a pain to have at least a continental framework earth turning on the screen. My task was to work on a graphics library - something what we today would call a very primitive vertex shader, programmed in 8086 assembler. The code "quick & dirty" wrote commands and patterns directly into the graphics chips' registers. Main programming was done in Turbo Pascal. I put a lot of money to have at least an EGA graphics card which could drive a color monitor. And to speed up floating point, an 8087 FPU ate up the rest of the budget.
It was a pointless try. The hardware was simply not able to do such a job, and I dropped it all, sold the hardware and changed to another of my hobbies. (If you're interested in lasers, watch out http://www.geocities.com/diane_va/laser/index_E.html ).
I came back to PCs in 2000 when I had some networkers course. Ssystem 1.6 was included in the SuSE Linux 6.4 distrubution. Thought, "wow, that's it", and I ran it quite a long time. Learned to hack .ssc files and to have my own stuff. Followed it to OpenUniverse, and then to Celestia. Always on the edge of what my Y2k notebook can give. Celestia runs but not that nice, dropping frames which is mostly caused by the slow notebook graphics chip.
Found the Celestia forum here. Found there are lots of enthusiasts like me, found there's a possibility to upload addons for others who like to hack .ssc files and such stuff. That's the reason I put so much work into the Impactors addon - YOU. For me alone, well,... one meteoroide would have been enough...
Finally I decided to have new hardware just to run (well, 95% of the time) Celestia. That's the stuff listed at the bottom of this page. I'm not yet ready in installing all the addons I want to have... then I watched the discussion about the further development of Celestia.
I thought about to help in further development, but a short look to the source code let me drop that. Celestia certainly is not a good C++ learning project. Most time I programmed Pascal and Fortran - I'm even not very skilled in C. So the more I feel how important it is to encourage all who keep development going on. A big thanks goes to Fridger and Toti. And not the least a very big thanks to Chris who started it all here. Even if he now is tired about it. I can understand him - sometimes in life things change. They did for me, too.
Don't let Celestia die. Maybe I'm very emotional about it, but it is all I ever dreamed to have on a computer. Every time I start it I'm remembered what a beautiful gem our precious earth is. And the universe around it.
With Celestia, a dream came true. Please let it go on.
~Diane.
I watched out for some time the discussion about Chris' disapperance and how the development of Celestia can go on in the mean time. And I want to give some very personal thoughts here, about Celestia, what's its meaning for me. Nothing technical but philosophical. Watching out for the Stars is philosophy.
I'm not young but born in the 60ies. A child of the "Star Trek" generation, and of course I was fascinated about spaceflight (and lasers and more). I saw the first moon landing live in TV.
When it came to computers small enough to have it at home OF COURSE I wondered if there could be some kind of space simulation running on it. I dreamed of something which today really exists - CELESTIA!
Those were the days of the legendary Apple ][ compatibles (I had one). Later, the first PC/XT compatibles had more power (a note for those of you who are born later: we talk about an 8086 processor running 4.77 MHz and 512kB RAM - YES, that's MEGAHertz and KILObytes).
On that PC, we (a friend and I) tried to get graphics stuff running. It was a pain to have at least a continental framework earth turning on the screen. My task was to work on a graphics library - something what we today would call a very primitive vertex shader, programmed in 8086 assembler. The code "quick & dirty" wrote commands and patterns directly into the graphics chips' registers. Main programming was done in Turbo Pascal. I put a lot of money to have at least an EGA graphics card which could drive a color monitor. And to speed up floating point, an 8087 FPU ate up the rest of the budget.
It was a pointless try. The hardware was simply not able to do such a job, and I dropped it all, sold the hardware and changed to another of my hobbies. (If you're interested in lasers, watch out http://www.geocities.com/diane_va/laser/index_E.html ).
I came back to PCs in 2000 when I had some networkers course. Ssystem 1.6 was included in the SuSE Linux 6.4 distrubution. Thought, "wow, that's it", and I ran it quite a long time. Learned to hack .ssc files and to have my own stuff. Followed it to OpenUniverse, and then to Celestia. Always on the edge of what my Y2k notebook can give. Celestia runs but not that nice, dropping frames which is mostly caused by the slow notebook graphics chip.
Found the Celestia forum here. Found there are lots of enthusiasts like me, found there's a possibility to upload addons for others who like to hack .ssc files and such stuff. That's the reason I put so much work into the Impactors addon - YOU. For me alone, well,... one meteoroide would have been enough...
Finally I decided to have new hardware just to run (well, 95% of the time) Celestia. That's the stuff listed at the bottom of this page. I'm not yet ready in installing all the addons I want to have... then I watched the discussion about the further development of Celestia.
I thought about to help in further development, but a short look to the source code let me drop that. Celestia certainly is not a good C++ learning project. Most time I programmed Pascal and Fortran - I'm even not very skilled in C. So the more I feel how important it is to encourage all who keep development going on. A big thanks goes to Fridger and Toti. And not the least a very big thanks to Chris who started it all here. Even if he now is tired about it. I can understand him - sometimes in life things change. They did for me, too.
Don't let Celestia die. Maybe I'm very emotional about it, but it is all I ever dreamed to have on a computer. Every time I start it I'm remembered what a beautiful gem our precious earth is. And the universe around it.
With Celestia, a dream came true. Please let it go on.
~Diane.
