Celestia Forums

Hi,
I'd like to use Celestia to have a "dynamic" wallpaper on my linux desktop. I know other programs, like Kstars, can be used for this purpose: they somehow run in the background and pipe the image at regular intervals to the desktop.

I was wondering, is it something possible with Celestia? It would be enough for it to save an image at regular time intervals and I could write a tiny script that at the same interval takes the image and puts it on the desktop.

At worst, it could be enough to have Celestia able to start, save an image and exiting -all in the background- so that I can script it to run regularly this way.

Is it possible? If not, do you think it's an interesting/easy to add feature for a future release?

In principle, a Lua (Celx) script can create snapshots at periodic intervals. However, Celestia uses the system's graphics hardware to draw its images. It has to be running and displaying the image that is to be recorded. I think this defeats your idea of having the snapshots recorded in the background.

Well, that's better than nothing!

Is it possible to say to Celestia to exit after having done the script?
So I could write something that:

- starts Celestia in some unused virtual desktop
- the script positions the view where I'd love and would take the images
- then Celestia exits
- the script takes the generated image and splashes it on my background.

If this is possible, maybe it's better (although more disk-space expensive) to do a bit more complex lua script that every night calculates views for the next 24/48 hours at 10 minutes itervals and saves the 360 resulting images... and putting it (with celestia able to exit, anyway), and then I'd just display the images done during the night at the right time. Just sharing thoughts.

I don't know if when Celestia draws in an off-screen virtual window it will actually create a snapshotable window. I've never tried it.

Documentation on Lua (Celx) scripts is available on Harald's Web page at http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/

The screenshot function is described at
http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/celx-summ ... screenshot