Celestia Forums

Hey, I think I may have already posted a message about this 5 or 6 prereleases ago, but I think there is something wrong with the coordinates in the start.cel document. it goes to california, but if you change them, it always goes to somewhere in Indonesia. Possible bug?

Mike,

"It works fine for me!"

Exactly what are you changing?
The way to look down on your home is to uncomment the line that ends in Seattle! and change the latitude and longitude that it specifies.

For example, setting the longitude to -75 (5 hours x15 degrees/hour west of Grenwitch) will leave you looking down on New England.

{
# select { object "Sol/Jupiter/Io" }
select { object "Sol/Earth" }
follow {}
select { object "Sol" }
lock {}
select { object "Sol/Earth" }
gotoloc { position [ -19000 0 0 ] time 0.1 yrot 90 }
wait { duration 0.1 }
follow {}
# goto { time 5 }
# gotolonglat { time 0 distance 1e11 longitude 0 latitude 0 }
# gotolonglat { time 0 distance 2.5 longitude -73 latitude 41.2 }
# wait { duration 0.1 }
# orbit { axis [ 0 1 0 ] rate 10 duration 7 }
# goto { time 5 distance 10 }
# wait { duration 5.0 }
}

look right?

Ths line is still commented out.
You need to take out the # at the beginning of it.

it works! so basically the # means it doesnt do anything? if so, then why is all this there:

# goto { time 5 }
# gotolonglat { time 0 distance 1e11 longitude 0 latitude 0 }
# gotolonglat { time 0 distance 2.5 longitude -73 latitude 41.2 }
# wait { duration 0.1 }
# orbit { axis [ 0 1 0 ] rate 10 duration 7 }
# goto { time 5 distance 10 }
# wait { duration 5.0 }

Right: the # is what's called a "comment character"
It tells Celestia to ignore everything to the right of it on the line.
Such things are usually used when a programmer wants to include some comments describing the intent of the code.

They're frequently used when debugging. For example, often a programmer will include Print statements to track what a program/s doing and then "comment them out" for the final release. When it comes time to work on that section of code again, maybe because of a bug, it's easer to remove the comment character than to recreate all the informational typeout.

In this case, I suspect Chris was playing around with various things in the startup script and decided not to use them just yet, but didn't want to forget what he had been doing. It also provides an exampe of what can be done so a novice can easily make customizations.

yes, well i deleted all of the lines starting with # and it changed the start up a lot