Celestia Forums

[quote="Celestia Users Guide"]Now, press and hold down the letter [ A ] on the keyboard for a second or two. This is the throttle for your spaceship. You will begin moving forward. Your speed is shown in the lower left of the screen. You will start slowly (in meters/sec). As you hold down the [ A ] key, Celestia increases your speed exponentially. Accelerate to between 18 and ?€?20 km/s?€

I went to a search engine called Alta Vista and pasted the following text in the little space :

set my speed to an exact value celestia

After a delay of 2 seconds, the first link it gave was this :

http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/celx-summary-latest.html

The word setspeed occurs on the page.

Thnak you

ArtificialEntity wrote:I went to a search engine called Alta Vista and pasted the following text in the little space :

set my speed to an exact value celestia

After a delay of 2 seconds, the first link it gave was this :

http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/celx-summary-latest.html

The word setspeed occurs on the page.

Thnak you

Globemaker, is that you?

Or are you some random Alta Vista shill? Because you could always just post a useful answer to a question without going through the "I went to a search engine called Alta Vista" spiel first.

As it is, your answer is useless, because 'setspeed' is in there as a function to call in a script, and thus doesn't answer the question.

Anyone can use a search engine - when people ask questions they're asking for specific answers.

(BTW, any more posts like this from you and you will be reported to the mods. As it is you've made it clear that you're an alt for a pre-existing/active account, which I think is frowned on here).

Thankyou ArtificialEntity for the valuable service you are providing.

Perhaps because you are an automated bot with limited sophistication, you failed to parse that one of my criteria was to do this interactively. (Obviously I did not explicitly state this, which would explain it, so "my bad")

However, you have given me food for thought... If a one-line script containing a setspeed command could be assigned to a hotkey, then that would achieve the stated goal I believe.

Would you care to parse that?

BTW: Whatever happened to ArtificialDeity (did it get a virus, or just get forked)

Malenfant wrote:Globemaker, is that you?
Or are you some random Alta Vista shill? Because you could always just post a useful answer to a question without going through the "I went to a search engine called Alta Vista" spiel first.
As it is, your answer is useless, because 'setspeed' is in there as a function to call in a script, and thus doesn't answer the question.
Anyone can use a search engine - when people ask questions they're asking for specific answers.
(BTW, any more posts like this from you and you will be reported to the mods. As it is you've made it clear that you're an alt for a pre-existing/active account, which I think is frowned on here).

Malenfant,
I do appreciate your point, but I think you are jumping a bit hard on AE.
I do not have any objection to ArtificialEntity's posting. His answer was not useless. He appears to be someone who is being helpful in a positive and light-hearted manner, whereas I don't find your posting to be of any help at all. If you know the answer to my question, why don't you just post it, instead of just jumping on someone else who is actually trying to help? That's just noise.

What you are complaining about is his style. Everyone has their own individual style, and I have no problem with that. I suggest to you that you should see past the style and look at the actual content of his posting.

He has actually gone to the effort of searching on my behalf and has located a document which may be helpful to me. He is being helpful while also making the point that this is something I could have and possibly should have done myself.
It did lead me to increased knowledge of celestia which may in the end contribute to solving my problem.

A little more tolerance would be appreciated.

Please leave the moderating to Selden. I believe he is quite capable in that respect.

escaped character deleted

Chuft-Captain wrote:I do appreciate your point, but I think you are jumping a bit hard on AE.
I do not have any objection to ArtificialEntity's posting. His answer was not useless. He appears to be someone who is being helpful in a positive and light-hearted manner, whereas I don't find your posting to be of any help at all. If you know the answer to my question, why don't you just post it, instead of just jumping on someone else who is actually trying to help? That's just noise.

He isn't trying to help though. He's done four posts, all in the same way, and now it seems has revealed itself to be a bot-program (EDIT: how convenient, he's deleted his last post to hide his tracks ). It's not someone being helpful, it's someone wasting time writing an automated response that doesn't actually help at all. It found the term 'setspeed' in a page, it didn't actually tell you what to do with it. It's not all that different to a spambot, and they're usually banned around here.

As it is, I'm getting quite heartily sick of all the "tongue-in-cheek" posts and similar useless drivel that I've seen around the Celestia forums lately. If people want to help they should just damn well type their answers seriously and not beat around the bush or hide behind alts or write stupid programs. If people just want to play around and "tease" then they should go elsewhere - this isn't a damn playground, it's a board for asking and answering serious questions about a solar system viewing program that people put a lot of effort into making. Posts - and posters like ArtificialDeity and Globemaker and Telepath and the recently banned Bowserjoe - are just clogging the place up with noise, and should not be welcomed or encouraged here. You don't need to be a moderator to figure that out.

As it is I've helped a lot of people on these boards with serious answers to questions. But lately it seems that it's harder for those to be heard because of noise like this. Thurlor's thread on the P&A board asking about Jupiter and Saturn was pretty much drowned out because of the "teasers" there that Telepath posted.

Please leave the moderating to Selden. I believe he is quite capable in that respect.

Actually, I've brought a lot of spammers and noise posts to his attention (and Chris' too). Since this ArtificialEntity is nothing more than an automated response written by another member (and given the modus operandi I'm pretty certain it must be globemaker) then he is IMO abusing their membership of this board. On other boards they'd be tracked down and given the boot.

EDIT: Yeah, it's got to be globemaker again, he was the one behind ArtificialDeity too (note the similar name), as he admitted on this thread:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... c&start=45

globemaker wrote:It is most gratifying to have several people fall for my automated "robo-taunt". It seems you guys could not distinguish my text program from a real human. Thank you for testing my Perl program instantiated as "ArtificialDeity".

And he was warned by Selden there too:

selden wrote:GM,

Intentionally misleading postings like the one above are inappropriate.
Unfortunately, such things are *not* considered funny by any of us.

I've already drawn Chris' attention to these stunts, hopefully he'll boot globemaker and all his stupid little programs off this board and ban his IP for repeated stunts like this. Or at the very least warn him to stop.

Malenfant wrote:He isn't trying to help though. He's done four posts, all in the same way, and now it seems has revealed itself to be a bot-program. It's not someone being helpful, it's someone wasting time writing an automated response that doesn't actually help at all. It found the term 'setspeed' in a page, it didn't actually tell you what to do with it. This "artificial entity" is a text-writing program that returns what is in all likelihood nonsense.

In light of his last post, I am now in agreement with you Malenfant regarding Artificial*. I have lost my patience, and retract my previous defense of the bot.
I agree that there is no place for this sort of timewasting. It might be funny the first time, but the novelty soon wears off.

BTW: Do you know if what I want to do with setting the speed is possible interactively or by assigning a setspeed script to a keystroke? I've been unable to find a way so far.

Chuft-Captain wrote:BTW: Do you know if what I want to do with setting the speed is possible interactively or by assigning a setspeed script to a keystroke? I've been unable to find a way so far.

I don't, unfortunately. Pressing A or Z - even for an instant - seems to give you a different speed change every time . Doesn't even seem to be affected by slowing down time (I wondered if the speed change was happening over a fixed interval of time).

Chuft-Captain wrote:Do you know if what I want to do with setting the speed is possible interactively or by assigning a setspeed script to a keystroke? I've been unable to find a way so far.

You might replace the "demo.cel" script that comes with celestia and use the 'd' key for your setspeed command.

steffens

steffens wrote:You might replace the "demo.cel" script that comes with celestia and use the 'd' key for your setspeed command.

Steffens, that's the sort of "out of the square" thinking I like to see. That idea has potential, however, although I haven't done much scripting, I think setspeed might be a CELX command only, so I might have to call a CELX script from demo.cel.
EDIT: according to the documentation I was kindly referred to by AE above, the units for setspeed are micro-lightyears (I assume this is per-second), so not sure if it will be accurate enough.

I'm going to investigate this idea and report back.

Cheers

Chuft-Captain wrote:If a one-line script containing a setspeed command could be assigned to a hotkey, then that would achieve the stated goal I believe.

You can write a CELX script to assign custom key functions, as described here.

- Hank

Yeah, but I don't think you can actually just (for example) open up a dialog box to enter a speed value of your own into. The custom key thing might work if you always want to be travelling at a specific speed, or you could run a script that might allow you to enter a speed perhaps, but that's still a few steps more than is ideal for the requested purpose isn't it?

hank wrote:You can write a CELX script to assign custom key functions, as described here.

Yeah, thanks Hank. I found your original post in the Scripting Forum last night and wrote a couple of scripts based on the example in the Wikibook. Thanks very much. I really appreciated being able to see a few examples of how a CelX script is put together.

Unfortunately, I still have to do a file-open on the script in-order to allow the hot key to be activated, but no big deal, it still works. It would be nice if the function could be permanently (or at least for a session) assigned to a hot-key, so it would be one-touch, but unfortunately as you know the script runs in an infinite loop which effectively intercepts other normal Celestia keys until you escape from the script. I guess this is a feature of CelX/Lua which can't be got around.

Question: The only other way around I can think of doing it would be if you could call a CelX function directly from a .Cel script. Is this possible ????

Anyone got any ideas? Malenfant, you seemed to feature quite a bit in Hank's post. You obviously know a bit about this area. Do you know the answer to the question above or have any other ideas?

Thanks

Chuft-Captain wrote:Unfortunately, I still have to do a file-open on the script in-order to allow the hot key to be activated, but no big deal, it still works. It would be nice if the function could be permanently (or at least for a session) assigned to a hot-key, so it would be one-touch, but unfortunately as you know the script runs in an infinite loop which effectively intercepts other normal Celestia keys until you escape from the script. I guess this is a feature of CelX/Lua which can't be got around.

I'd like to see Celestia eventually support more robust UI customization by providing the ability to assign Celx/Lua functions to various events so that they would be called directly from Celestia's event loop without the need to have a user script running. Initial set-up could be done via a Lua script optionally specified in the Celestia configuration file. This should not be difficult to implement.

- Hank