Celestia Forums

There's an old bug which is annoying me alot these days : stars bookmarks are unreliable if I add few new stars in my database. I recently added the new exoplanets datafiles from Grant (from CVS), including two new stars which weren't included in Celestia's database.

Well, I have lots of binaries and lone stars bookmarked in my favorite menu which were working perfectly until now. After adding the new files, most of my stars bookmarks are all messed up. When I try to use one of them, there's another star selected in the upper-left corner, apparentlly picked randomly, while I still see the bookmarked star on the screen. If I then move very slightly the point of view, Celestia shift me to a very distant location, related to the wrongly selected star. This is extremely frustrating.

Anyone else experienced this problem ?

I'm pretty sure this bug isn't caused by any stars conflicting with identical HIP numbers.

Martin,

Could you please send me your favorite.cel file so that I can test this on my system ?

Vincent,

unfortunately, the favorite links are stored in the preferences file, on the Mac. There isn't any favorite file.

Just bookmark several stars (especially binaries). Then add (or remove ?) some stars in your database (not the same as the bookmarked stars), then restart Celestia and try to use your bookmarks again. In my case, the bug isn't systematic, but occurs frequently enough to be extremelly irritating, since I then need to remake all the afflicted bookmarks, once some stars have been added to my database.

Cham wrote:unfortunately, the favorite links are stored in the preferences file, on the Mac. There isn't any favorite file.

This may be a bug in the Mac version. It could be using numbers rather than names to restore the reference object. (Also, it appears to be restoring the selected object, not the reference object.) Try creating the same bookmark before and after adding stars, and compare the bookmark entries in the preferences plist file.

- Hank

It's probably a bug in the OS X version. I didn't checked explicitely, but since the bookmarks are stored in the preferences plist, it's probably related to that fact instead than a bug in Celestia itself. It's a bug very similar to the one I've described recently on the forum (and which was corrected by Vincent and DW), about DSO's.

DW ?

On the topic, if the cross platform UI don't see the ligth soon, it would be nice to have the bookmarks in a separate file just llike other platforms... (the problem of the prefs is that if it comes corrupted and you must trash it, and adios bookmarks...)

I can't reproduce this bug on Windows...

Vincent wrote:I can't reproduce this bug on Windows...

The bug isn't totally systematic. In some way, there's a kind of correlation between the stars and the bookmarked stars in the fav menu. I'm still suspecting it's just a Mac problem, however.

I'll do some checking...

It won't fix existing bookmarks, but I've committed a fix for any new bookmarks that you create.

New bookmarks will store a celurl. Selecting the bookmark will be equivalent to navigating to the url. Legacy favorites info is also saved alongside the url for backward compatibility with older versions of Celestia.

Thanks Dirkpitt, I'll check this later tonight, when I'll be back home.

In the meanwhile, can you please send me the patch by email, so I can apply it to my custom version ?

The annoying thing, is I already have lots of afflicted bookmarks. I'll have to rebuild the whole favorites menu once again.