Extrasolar planets have disappeared! Help!

[bh]

Hello all...my first visit to this section. Gulp!

I'm editing my extrasolar.ssc, trying to get some nice textures, moons and other such type things in there. Things going quite well untill I edit one line and loose everything under it eg.

"b" "HD 130322"
{
Texture "gc_gasgt_02.jpg"
BumpMap "gc_gasgt_02-bump.jpg"
BumpHeight 1.2
SpecularTexture "gc_gasgt_02-spec.jpg"
SpecularColor [ 0.8 0.4 0.4 ]
SpecularPower 45.0
Color [ 0.69 0.15 0.43 ]
BlendTexture true
Radius 72000.71
HazeColor [ 0.21 0.41 0.29 ]
HazeDensity 0.5
Atmosphere {
Height 958.68
Lower [ 0.21 0.41 0.29 ]
Upper [ 0.30 0.43 0.11 ]
Sky [ 0.18 0.34 0.43 ]
CloudHeight 95.87
CloudSpeed 720.81
CloudMap "gc_gasgt_04-clouds.png"
}
EllipticalOrbit {
Period 1.9370
SemiMajorAxis 1.5539
Eccentricity 0.0015
Inclination 0.0100
MeanAnomaly 334.66
}
Rings
{
Inner 125606.53
Outer 230672.44
Texture "gc_rings_03.png"
Color [ 0.41 0.25 0.33 ]
}
RotationPeriod 453.92
Obliquity -5.52
Albedo 0.42
}

this works fine...but on the next line:

"b" "HD 75289"
{
Texture "gc_gasgt_02.jpg"
BumpMap "gc_gasgt_02-bump.jpg"
BumpHeight 1.2
SpecularTexture "gc_gasgt_02-spec.jpg"
SpecularColor [ 0.8 0.4 0.4 ]
SpecularPower 45.0
Color [ 0.69 0.15 0.43 ]
BlendTexture true
Radius 64834.71
HazeColor [ 0.21 0.41 0.29 ]
HazeDensity 0.5
Atmosphere
{
Height 958.68
Lower [ 0.21 0.41 0.29 ]
Upper [ 0.30 0.43 0.11 ]
Sky [ 0.18 0.34 0.43 ]
CloudHeight 95.87
CloudSpeed 720.81
CloudMap "gc_gasgt_04-clouds.png"

}
EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 1.9370
SemiMajorAxis 1.5539
Eccentricity 0.0015
Inclination 0.0100
MeanAnomaly 334.66
}
Rings
{
Inner 125606.53
Outer 230672.44
Texture "gc_rings_03.png"
Color [ 0.41 0.25 0.33 ]
}
RotationPeriod 453.92
Obliquity -5.52
Albedo 0.42
}

This is not there! Neither are any of the other 'unaltered' planets below this section on extrasolar.... AAArGH!

Is it a Celestia problem, a notepad problem or just my problem?

Please help if you can...

Many regards...bh.

PS. I've noticed that notepad is acting a bit strange on it's fomatting, like putting extra line spaces in and other type stuff. I've run a up-to-date virus check and all the other disk scan stuff but it's still a bit wierd.

[MalcolmP]

Hi bh, you asked "Please help if you can..."
well I am not sure if I can ! but I'll try

I did a cut&paste of your two planets into my notepad and saved it as bh.ssc
I placed it in my extras folder and ran my Celestia1.2.5.
Both planets appeared ok ! So it would seem that there is no (obvious?) syntax error in the stuff that you posted.
However, I dont have the textures that you used so the planet surfaces and rings were just plain.
Also, I ended up with two planets "b" round each star, (because the original ones were still present in extrasolar.ssc) so I had to re-name yours as "c" to avoid confusion. Well, actually there wasnt too much confusion because the orbits of your new ones differ considerably from the original ones.
I didnt really want to modify my existing extrasolar.ssc ( not at this time of night, after a couple of glasses of Laphroaig, anything might happen !)

So, I dont know if that will help, but it may be a way for you to proceed to track things down :-
ie. reinstate your original extrasolar.ssc and put your new planets into a bh.ssc in the extras and take it from there ?

hth,
Malcolm.

[selden]

I don't see anything obvious either, but...

a) You might split the file up into several different files. The definitions don't have to all be in one. Also, that way you can isolate the entries that're causing problems. You might be mistaken about where it's happening.

b) Try using WordPad instead of NotePad. It works just as well for me, anyhow.

c) It helps the reader if you put
[co de] ... [/co de]
(without the spaces) around text that you quote so that the indentation and spacing are preserved.

I hope these suggestions help a little.

[MalcolmP]

b) Try using WordPad instead of NotePad. It works just as well for me, anyhow.

Hi Selden, just a little thing of no great consequence :
I have recently been playing with the Ulysses ssc files off your site and have found odd characters in them ( I presume formatting characters ? as though they have not been saved in plain text type, ie. in similar style to .doc format, not sure,,, ?) **
anyway, I have had to load them into wordpad and then back out in txt format to get them into plain ( notepad type) .txt files.
So I dunno, as I said, just a little thing but as bh comments on something strange in his notepad there might be something here to investigate ??
maybe tomorrow, 2am local now, I should be in bed :)

** edit, a little later ! but I should have done it earlier :(
I have loaded Selden's ulysses.ssc file into a hex ediitor and I see the difference,
each line is terminated with only a 0Ahex, a line feed character.
but my notepad likes to see files with lines terminated by 0D0Ahex
ie a carriage return+line feed, to display normally.So, the upshot is that I dont think this is going to help bh's problem !! Sorry.

[selden]

Malcolm,

Yup. That's right: the various catalog files on my Web site are Unix style text files. Lines are separated by the <new-line> code, not by the <carriage-return> <line-feed> pair used by Windows. (ASCII <new-line> and <line-feed> characters have the same binary representaion. I think the standards committee that came up with that idea must have been smoking something other than tobacco...)

Fortunately, the Windows version of Celestia has no problems with that file format. As you discovered, WordPad doesn't have any trouble displaying it properly, either.

[bh]

Hi guys...Thanks for your help so far on this one. I still think think something has gone very strange with notepad. I will reinstate my original extrasolar.ssc and see if I can edit it with wordpad, but I'm not keen to cut and paste the modified entries from notepad.

I use notepad a lot for coding webpages - if notepad is currupted then I'm a bit stuffed. I might try to replace notepad.exe and see if that helps.

I will post back on my progress.

Regards...bh.

[bh]

Well...I have to admit to being a little red-faced as I write this. I've found the problem. I was an Info url on the wrong line! That's all! I had to look long and hard at where I thought the break in communication was happening and there is was, staring me in the face...doh!

Sorry if I caused a stir with that one. I will try harder in future.

Regards to all...bh.