Celestia Forums

Hi everybody,

Here's the new Celestia_1.4.1_patch3 final release :
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* Windows (4.91 Mo): http://vincent.gian.club.fr/celestia/ce ... patch3.zip
> Just unzip and paste the content of the celestia_win32_1.4.1_patch3 folder into your main Celestia folder. None of your files will be overwritten.

* Modified Source files for compilation (4.38 Mo): http://vincent.gian.club.fr/celestia/ce ... patch3.zip
> You'll find some compilation instructions for Mac/Win in the readme.txt file. If you want to check the changes in the code, just make a search for 'Victor', 'Boux', 'DoctorJoe', 'Mark', 'Vincent'.
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This version integrates :

> Vincent's patch for the new ScriptImage / InfoImage / InfoText / InfoScript functions :
- InfoImage / InfoText : http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9123
- ScriptImage : http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 3&start=87
- InfoScript : http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 3&start=40

> Victor's sound patch (modified by Vincent) :
- http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8624

> Boux's and Vincent's patch to integrate the extended SBbc Hubble type for the Milky Way, along with the new SBbc.pts model :
- http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7607

> Doctorjoe's patch (modified by Vincent) to display start/finish dates for spacecrafts :
- http://www.gnacademy.org/twiki/bin/view ... Extensions

> Boux's patch to display semi-transparent constellations :
- http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8575

---------------------------------------------------------------
- Changes from the official 1.4.1 version :
---------------------------------------------------------------
> Celestia_1.4.1_patch3 version :
- Added the new InfoScript function. This feature allows the user to display more information about the selected object :
-- by automatically switching to 'Ultra Verbose' mode.
-- by running a customized .cel or .celx script.
InfoScript is available via the Contextual Menu displayed when right-clicking on an object.
Just choose the new option 'More about XX', where XX is the selected object.
- Added the new 'verbosity' command for .cel and .celx scripts to set the level of Information Text displayed on screen.
- Added the new 'fitscreen' argument to the 'overlay' script command that allows an image to be resized to fit the Celestia-window.
- Fixed a bug in the ScriptImage function : an image loaded in a script could be displayed at the beginning of a following script when the previous script was terminated by the user ([ESC] key, ...). The 'duration' argument is from now set back to 0 as soon as the script ends.
- New layout :


> Celestia_1.4.1_patch2 version :
- Added new ScriptImage / InfoImage / InfoText functions. These features allow the user to display :
-- any overlay image during a script => ScriptImage function
-- any overlay image during navigation => InfoImage Function
-- any overlay text during navigation => InfoText Function
> Every Celestia-object can have specific InfoImage and InfoText that are displayed when the object is selected and when the 'Ultra Verbose' mode is activated (by pressing the [V] key or checking the 'Ultra verbose' button in the "Render > View options" Menu).
> InfoText and InfoImage functions can be applied to every Celestia-object : Bodies (planets, moons, asteroids, comets and spacecrafts), Locations, Stars (and barycenters), and Deepsky Objects (galaxies, nebulae, open clusters).
- Added the possibility to pause/resume the sound when the spacebar is pressed, since time and script are also paused.
- Added the 'nopause' argument to the 'play' function to precise whether a channel will be paused or not when the spacebar is pressed.
- Fixed the "goto" command bug for start/finish dates : 'g' => Goto Selection / 'G' => Goto Start Date.

> Celestia_1.4.1_patch version :
- Improvement of comet tail rendering
- New SBbc Hubble type declaration for the Milky way
- New SBbc.pts model for the Milky Way
- New Galaxy color rendering (hue modified and a bit more saturation)

Vincent:

This is a great new feature. I will have loads of uses for it in my educational classes and activities.

Thank you

Frank

Hello Vincent, I loaded and tried the new patch, and I confirm you that the sound files dimensions MUST be greater than 500 kb, otherwise Celestia crashes (strange, but not dramatic).
I found a solution using the shareware -4Musics WAV Bitrate Changer- that increases the bitrate, and so the file length.
I need a confirm: now we can use a -base- music theme, looping it for all the script length, then, when needed, to launch other sound clips, one at a time, correct?
I mean, we can load on both channel 0 and channel 1, no more, that's correct?
The -loop- command in the -play- line gives 0 for NO and 1 for YES, correct?
Sorry for my questions, due to my total ignorance on sound editing.
Thanks a lot, Vincent, like Fsgregs' my brain is thinking on the many many possibilities you have added.
Bye

Andrea

ANDREA wrote:Hello Vincent, I loaded and tried the new patch, and I confirm you that the sound files dimensions MUST be greater than 500 kb, otherwise Celestia crashes (strange, but not dramatic).

Hello Andrea,
I'm happy you noticed the few lines I wrote about this limitation in the readme.txt file. I think this is an OpenAL bug. I've reported it on the OpenAL dev forum, but I haven't had an answer yet... Victor may tell us more about that, but I'm not sure he still reads the forum...

I found a solution using the shareware -4Musics WAV Bitrate Changer- that increases the bitrate, and so the file length.

Good ! I do the same with my sound editor. You can also increase the samplerate into 22 kHz or 44.1kHz. Or simply copy/paste several times the loop to have a longer soundfile...

I need a confirm: now we can use a -base- music theme, looping it for all the script length, then, when needed, to launch other sound clips, one at a time, correct? I mean, we can load on both channel 0 and channel 1, no more, that's correct?

No. You can play up to 8 soundfiles at the same time, from channel 0 up to channel 7. You can have a look at the sound script I made for Frank's Educationnal Activities....

The -loop- command in the -play- line gives 0 for NO and 1 for YES, correct?

Yes !

ANDREA wrote:Sorry for my questions, due to my total ignorance on sound editing.

No problem, don't hesitate to ask me for more information if you need it. You can also read Victor's post about the sound patch : http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8624

Vincent wrote:

ANDREA wrote:Hello Vincent, I loaded and tried the new patch, and I confirm you that the sound files dimensions MUST be greater than 500 kb, otherwise Celestia crashes (strange, but not dramatic).

Hello Andrea,
I'm happy you noticed the few lines I wrote about this limitation in the readme.txt file. I think this is an OpenAL bug. I've reported it on the OpenAL dev forum, but I haven't had an answer yet... Victor may tell us more about that, but I'm not sure he still reads the forum...

ANDREA wrote:I found a solution using the shareware -4Musics WAV Bitrate Changer- that increases the bitrate, and so the file length.

Good ! I do the same with my sound editor. You can also increase the samplerate into 22 kHz or 44.1kHz. Or simply copy/paste several times the loop to have a longer soundfile...

Hi Vincent,

This looks very much similar to problems I encountered when testing sound patch for Victor back in January.
I refer you to my original post: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... ght=#66625 (just in case it's useful to you, as Victor seems to have "gone bush")
I also sent him a PM with some other testing results describing crashes under various circumstances, but I'm not sure if he ever read it. If you would like to see that as well, then just let me know and I'll forward it to you.

Regards
CC

Vincent wrote:

ANDREA wrote:Hello Vincent, I loaded and tried the new patch, and I confirm you that the sound files dimensions MUST be greater than 500 kb, otherwise Celestia crashes (strange, but not dramatic).

Hello Andrea, I'm happy you noticed the few lines I wrote about this limitation in the readme.txt file. I think this is an OpenAL bug. I've reported it on the OpenAL dev forum, but I haven't had an answer yet... Victor may tell us more about that, but I'm not sure he still reads the forum...

ANDREA wrote:I found a solution using the shareware -4Musics WAV Bitrate Changer- that increases the bitrate, and so the file length.

Good! I do the same with my sound editor. You can also increase the samplerate into 22 kHz or 44.1kHz. Or simply copy/paste several times the loop to have a longer soundfile...

quote="ANDREA"]I need a confirm: now we can use a -base- music theme, looping it for all the script length, then, when needed, to launch other sound clips, one at a time, correct? I mean, we can load on both channel 0 and channel 1, no more, that's correct?

No. You can play up to 8 soundfiles at the same time, from channel 0 up to channel 7. You can have a look at the sound script I made for Frank's Educationnal Activities....

So I can obtain a mix of e.g. many different sounds. This sounds (oops!) very interesting!

Vincent wrote:

ANDREA wrote:The -loop- command in the -play- line gives 0 for NO and 1 for YES, correct?

Yes !

Vincent wrote:

ANDREA wrote:Sorry for my questions, due to my total ignorance on sound editing.

No problem, don't hesitate to ask me for more information if you need it. You can also read Victor's post about the sound patch : http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8624

I'll do, thanks a lot Vincent. I admit that at the beginning I followed mostly the image insertion possibility more that the sounds, but I'm going to fill my gap, with your precious help.
Bye

Andrea

CC,

Thanks for the link ! And as you suggested, I would be interested in reading the other testing results you sent to Victor... Thanks !

As for your 4th and 5th points in your post....

Chuft-Captain wrote:4. I think it would be good if your patch also searched for sound files installed in any sub-directory of the Extras folder, in the same way addon models are installed. eg. Celestia\extras\<addon-name>\sounds (There's bound to be an existing method call for this)
This I think would be tidier in the long run than having all the sounds from multiple add-ons being dumped in the Celestia\sounds folder, which is the only place your patch looks at the moment. (I think lots of people will want to add sound to Celestia once they have your patch, so it will get very messy in the sound folder!)

You can place your soundfiles in any subfolder inside the 'sound' folder... Just add it the relative path definition. According to Victor's post, you can also put your soundfiles anywhere you want, and then define a full path starting with a slash '/'. But I never managed to make this work...

Chuft-Captain wrote:5. When you pause time and scripts in Celestia (space bar), the sound should also be paused, because it's usually going to be synchronised to whatever else is going on in the script. Is this possible?

That sounds to me like an interesting request... I'll have a look at the code to see if I can do something...

Thanks !

Vincent ....... it seems to me that there is enough material to start a fork of Celestia.
If the advanced add-on developers will start to use extensively these functionalities IMHO there is no reason to keep the continuity with Celestia, specially if those funtionalities won't be included in a future release of Celestia.
If a new parallel project will start some developers should even decide to migrate to it or to continue to work both on the two at the same time. In a future the projects should merge back again.
About one year ago when Dr Joe has submitted a series of patches I've pursued this option preparing a dedicated environment on sourceforge, perhaps it is time to think again about this opportunity.

Kind regards

Vincent wrote:

Chuft-Captain wrote:When you pause time and scripts in Celestia (space bar), the sound should also be paused, because it's usually going to be synchronised to whatever else is going on in the script. Is this possible?

That sounds to me like an interesting request... I'll have a look at the code to see if I can do something... Thanks !

Sorry, but I don't agree on CC's request, because, e.g., I use a basic musical theme that lasts for all the show time, looping if needed, and the other sounds I use are clips, that last for the needed time only, no more.
I find ugly a sudden stop of all the sounds (including the musical theme), pressing the spacebar, and equally ugly a sudden start, pressing it again. Normally, I think, we need to stop the show just to explain something more or to evidentiate something on the screen, and this can be done more softly if music goes on.
If the problem absolutely needs a solution, I think it should be given the possibility to stop all or some sound files only, at our will, if possible.
E.g. letting the channel 0 to stay always on, and when pressing the spacebar ALL the other sound files will stop.

But speaking of spacebar, I found a strange phenomenon, don't know if a bug: if I'm showing e.g. the Earth, rotating in real time, if I press the space bar it stops rotating, but when I press it again, the Earth stands immobile, until I press the -L- key to accelerate it.
Anyone else had the same problem?
Thank you.

Andrea

ANDREA wrote:

Vincent wrote:

Chuft-Captain wrote:When you pause time and scripts in Celestia (space bar), the sound should also be paused, because it's usually going to be synchronised to whatever else is going on in the script. Is this possible?

That sounds to me like an interesting request... I'll have a look at the code to see if I can do something... Thanks !

Sorry, but I don't agree on CC's request, because, e.g., I use a basic musical theme that lasts for all the show time, looping if needed, and the other sounds I use are clips, that last for the needed time only, no more.
I find ugly a sudden stop of all the sounds (including the musical theme), pressing the spacebar, and equally ugly a sudden start, pressing it again. Normally, I think, we need to stop the show just to explain something more or to evidentiate something on the screen, and this can be done more softly if music goes on.
If the problem absolutely needs a solution, I think it should be given the possibility to stop all or some sound files only, at our will, if possible.
E.g. letting the channel 0 to stay always on, and when pressing the spacebar ALL the other sound files will stop.

Perhaps the way to satisfy both situations would be to add an extra parameter on the play command so that any sound event could be optionally specified as background music.
So the default behaviour would be to pause sounds when time stopped (which would prevent sounds getting out of sync with the script), but any channel specified as background sound would continue to play.
Andrea, how do you stop your looped sounds from playing if you have to answer the phone?

Chuft-Captain wrote:

ANDREA wrote:I think it should be given the possibility to stop all or some sound files only, at our will, if possible.
E.g. letting the channel 0 to stay always on, and when pressing the spacebar ALL the other sound files will stop.

Perhaps the way to satisfy both situations would be to add an extra parameter on the play command so that any sound event could be optionally specified as background music.
So the default behaviour would be to pause sounds when time stopped (which would prevent sounds getting out of sync with the script), but any channel specified as background sound would continue to play.

I agree with your suggestion.

Chuft-Captain wrote:Andrea, how do you stop your looped sounds from playing if you have to answer the phone?

I don't need to stop them, because when I present my Celestia shows, my mobile is OFF.
Bye

Andrea

I've made the changes in Victor's sound patch to pause the sound playback when the spacebar is pressed, since time and script are also paused.

I have updated the zip files with the new executable and the new modified source files...
You'll find some more information about the 'nopause' argument and the changes I made in the code here : http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8624&start=32

You have to be careful if you change the volume of a 'nopaused' channel : since this channel is not affected by the pause, your volume changes won't be synchronized anymore with the other channels. So, the 'nopause' argument has to be kept for background music only.

Paolo wrote:Vincent ....... it seems to me that there is enough material to start a fork of Celestia.
If the advanced add-on developers will start to use extensively these functionalities IMHO there is no reason to keep the continuity with Celestia, specially if those funtionalities won't be included in a future release of Celestia.
If a new parallel project will start some developers should even decide to migrate to it or to continue to work both on the two at the same time. In a future the projects should merge back again.
About one year ago when Dr Joe has submitted a series of patches I've pursued this option preparing a dedicated environment on sourceforge, perhaps it is time to think again about this opportunity.

Kind regards

That do sound like a very good idea...

Vincent wrote:I've made the changes in Victor's sound patch to pause the sound playback on channels 1->7 when the spacebar is pressed, since time and script are also paused. Channel 0 is not affected by this pause so that it can be used for background music.
Is that OK for everybody ?
You have to be careful if you change the volume of channel 0 : since this channel is not affected by the pause, your volume changes won't be synchronized anymore with the other channels. So, channel 0 has to be kept for background music only.

Well, Vincent, you are a rocket!
It solves all our problems, I think, or at least solves mine.
Hope that CC will be equally satisfied by this improvement.

Anyone else found the problem I submitted last time, i.e. the lock of planets rotation after using spacebar to stop and then to start again?
It's a bit strange, and if this is a common problem, IMHO there is some conflict in code.
Bye

Andrea

tech2000 wrote:

Paolo wrote:Vincent ....... it seems to me that there is enough material to start a fork of Celestia.
If the advanced add-on developers will start to use extensively these functionalities IMHO there is no reason to keep the continuity with Celestia, specially if those funtionalities won't be included in a future release of Celestia.
If a new parallel project will start some developers should even decide to migrate to it or to continue to work both on the two at the same time. In a future the projects should merge back again.
About one year ago when Dr Joe has submitted a series of patches I've pursued this option preparing a dedicated environment on sourceforge, perhaps it is time to think again about this opportunity.

Kind regards

That do sound like a very good idea...

I suppose this can be done to make everybody happy, on one hand Celestia (original, almost a scientific database), on the other Celestia "Edu", same soft + handy features for educational purposes; if this happen, it would be nice to merge both version in many ways, first have the aprobation of Chris for all features (if he is interested in giving his opinion of course), same Web site for official releases, same splash with the "Edu" somewhere, etc...

Could be nice, but this mean another admin task for Chris so...
Why can we clon Chris in two or three more exemplaries!!!

ElChristou wrote:
I suppose this can be done to make everybody happy, on one hand Celestia (original, almost a scientific database), on the other Celestia "Edu", same soft + handy features for educational purposes; if this happen, it would be nice to merge both version in many ways, first have the aprobation of Chris for all features (if he is interested in giving his opinion of course), same Web site for official releases, same splash with the "Edu" somewhere, etc...

Could be nice, but this mean another admin task for Chris so...
Why can we clon Chris in two or three more exemplaries!!!

Instead of cloning Chris why not Vincent himself? A fork means that it is not necessary to have the approval of the original author. Exactly like Vincent has already done. He has proved to be capable of dealing effectively with the Celestia code adding new features.

C++ rules!

BTW I don't know if someone is interested but Stellarium is the project of the month on Sourceforge.

Kind regards

Paolo wrote:...A fork means that it is not necessary to have the approval of the original author...

I know, but...

It's true there is a strong new point of view with those features... it can be the real begining of a legitime fork (not the only: "huu... the dev is dead")...
but personally I would keep a strong link with the original dev...

I have decided to keep out of this discussion as much as possible.

For sure, I shall NOT be involved in any kind of forking (at this time). I'll stay with Chris, since our views about Celestia's basic design structure are matching very well since > 4 years!

++++++++++++++++++++
In any case it is my impression that essentially the only person who has expressed interest for forking Celestia is Paolo. I think it's his THIRD attempt, the previous two having failed.
++++++++++++++++++++

Looking at the /type and scope / of the implemented features in 1.4.1-patch.x, it is quite clear that a fork would be a rather final affair. I cannot see many chances for a later reunion. I could easily detail my statements, but at this time I guess it would unnecessarily heat up the discussion...

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:...For sure, I shall NOT be involved in any kind of forking (at this time). I'll stay with Chris, since our views about Celestia's basic design structure are matching very well since ~ 3.5 years!...

People who want to fork are free to do so if they want; earlier, the great problem was the lack of activity of the dev (wich I think can be a reason for forking but definitively not the best one), but now we are in front of some real new features that apparently don't match the views of the dev team (this mean they probably won't be integrated to Celestia). Those features seems to have a real sucess among the "educator" so why not?

If a fork is done to developpe a real project for educational purpose, well, fine... what I was saying earlier, is that this is an honorable reason so IMO it can be a real parallel project, following the dev of Celestia; more, I can easely imagine in this community a forum dedicated to educator and this special dev...

I don't see any reason to fear a fork in those conditions, in all case the Celestia dev won't suffer any lost, I mean the actual situation won't change at all (not enough coder, Chris in the mountains, etc... )

Hey Chris what are you waiting to give to all those good fellows your opinion???

ElChristou wrote:....
Hey Chris what are you waiting to give to all those good fellows your opinion???

We just communicated. Chris is working on some quite interesting Celestia feature...

Bye Fridger