Celestia Forums

A couple of times I have mentioned an annoying spaceflight bug that would only manifest itself after some event. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out what made it happen, until just now - it's using the arrow keys.

If you're flying in some arbitrary direction and simply press left-right or up-down to roll/pitch the camera, the direction of flight instantly becomes locked to the camera and will follow it no matter what direction the camera is facing, which means you can't pan to look at objects as you fly past them...

Well, now you know what causes it, it should be an easy fix...

The operation of the arrow keys is deliberate . . . You can use the mouse to look around if you like.

Enough people have complained about the way the arrow keys work to make me consider creating a configurable flight model. I don't think a single one will satisfy everyone.

--Chris

The only thing is, you can't use the mouse to roll the camera... well, not unless you exploit gimbal lock, which is a tedious way to do it.

I'm happy to accept the way Celestia's controls work, especially now that I know what to avoid.

People who want a flight model should probably try Orbiter:
http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html
It doesn't have interstellar flight, but it's lots of fun all the same.

Paul wrote:People who want a flight model should probably try Orbiter:
http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html
It doesn't have interstellar flight, but it's lots of fun all the same.

I followed that link and found a awesome astronautics simulator, unfortunately on the DirectX domain.

I agree users wanting such a simulation should try Orbiter instead on wasting efforts in changing the purpose of Celestia. Both examples are impressive enough to please the most demanding users, but following so similar trends (forums included), I wondered why not some sort of cross links could be stablished between one and the other. I wrote Martin Schweiger on that idea, and got that kind and enthusiastic reply (I should ask Martin permission to quote him, but I hope he will not be upset by that):

"On Celestia, needless to say, I am very impressed.

I think some sort of loose collaboration for the mutual benefit of both
simulators would be a very good idea. I guess you are not suggesting to
actually merge them into a single project. I think the aims of the two
simulators are quite different, so they should be perfectly able to
coexist alongside each other.

I'll be happy to sign up to the Celestia board, although generally my
own message board keeps me more than busy.
Likewise, any contributions from the Celestia community to the Orbiter
development will be very welcome. Martin Schweiger"

Orbiter could, from my point of view, address the needs of the Celestia community for Astronautics simulation, and provide Celestia tools for gravitational simulation or texture issues in return. I encourage all Celestia and Orbiter fans to join efforts to keep both platforms mutually independent but building on each other strenghts.

Orbiter is an amazing program that just keeps getting better. The documentation for it is great, too (something that you can't say about Celestia ) One useful collaboration idea would be add an Orbiter model loader to Celestia--there are a lot of great models created by Orbiter mod writers that would be neat to see in Celestia too, though we'd certainly need permission to use them.

--Chris

Paul wrote:A couple of times I have mentioned an annoying spaceflight bug that would only manifest itself after some event. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out what made it happen, until just now - it's using the arrow keys.

If you're flying in some arbitrary direction and simply press left-right or up-down to roll/pitch the camera, the direction of flight instantly becomes locked to the camera and will follow it no matter what direction the camera is facing, which means you can't pan to look at objects as you fly past them...

chris wrote:The operation of the arrow keys is deliberate . . . You can use the mouse to look around if you like.

I know this is an old post, but it still is an issue on my end. I have noticed that once I use the arrow keys (or even, for that matter, the keypad) for the first time after launching Celestia - the direction of flight becomes "locked" to whatever my camera view is.

Chris has responded that this is deliberate... but that I still can use the mouse to look around. That, actually is not the case for me (unless I have misunderstood him). For me, once a keyboard direction key is pressed, no matter what direction I turn the "camera" around to "look" after that, my flight direction follows it.

Anyone else able to verify that?

Dear People,
The camera lock problem happens in 1.4.1. Start cold with no special config file.
You will be at the start position looking at the earth. Using only the mouse, point the ship so that the earth is a little off center. Use the "A" key to accelerate to around 300 km/s. You will pass by the earth and if you use ONLY the mouse you can reorient the dispay and watch it slide by you and eventually it can be seen receeding away behind you. Using the mouse almost recenter the earth as it is going away from you. NOW quickly press a single arrow key (I used the up arrow) and the Earth will immediately reverse and start coming towards you. If you try to let the earth pass by again using only the mouse like at the beginning, you can't do it - the direction of travel IS locked to the center of the display. It will will remain locked until you go to [Render] [View options] and simply hit OK. Then it seems to reset and allows the mouse to move just the camera again until an arrow is pressed, then it will relock.

Yes, I can confirm here. But on Linux there is another bug when in this 'arrow' mode.

As I am travelling at 300km/s (or whatever) and you are moving always to wherever the centre of the screen is pointing, if I press 's' to stop dead, the speed does this:

0.0234
...
0.00000454
...
0.00000000000344
...
0.0000000000000000122
...
0.000000000000000000000000000683
...
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000

xxxxxx/other/slowdown.wmv <----- removed.



Nick