A web-based Celestia

[LeCook]

Hullo all,

I've gone through posted topics here such as VRML and Active X plugins and even though porting to XP and such are valiant efforts what would REALLY be a huge step would be to have Celestia entirely web based.

VRML, as stated, is kinda dead and never got off the ground. Furthermore, to the common user, installing such a plugin is downright complicated so methink's Active X or even a java webstart app would be the key.

I'm currently working on budgeting/managing a huge multimedia site/tv documentary encompassing regional/national air/space flight subjects and am trying to encourage Open Source solutions the likes of Celestia.

Ultimately, we would like to have a browser's ActiveX control (seemless installation to common Win32/IE users) to a server-based installation of Celestia. To goal being to have both its space navigation as well as a GIS/topographic/sattellite pic terrain navigation (1) similar to genova (2)

1) Genova: http://www.genova.ch
2) A Genova implementation: http://www.sports-3d.com/

Having that said, if such endeavours are in effect at this time, I'd appreciate a few samples/links!

I'm also open to development discussions & theories that would get the project forward as I foresee much visibillity to Open Source communities the likes of Celestia in the aforementionned project.

[t00fri]

Hullo all,

I've gone through posted topics here such as VRML and Active X plugins and even though porting to XP and such are valiant efforts what would REALLY be a huge step would be to have Celestia entirely web based.

VRML, as stated, is kinda dead and never got off the ground. Furthermore, to the common user, installing such a plugin is downright complicated so methink's Active X or even a java webstart app would be the key.

I'm currently working on budgeting/managing a huge multimedia site/tv documentary encompassing regional/national air/space flight subjects and am trying to encourage Open Source solutions the likes of Celestia.

Ultimately, we would like to have a browser's ActiveX control (seemless installation to common Win32/IE users) to a server-based installation of Celestia. To goal being to have both its space navigation as well as a GIS/topographic/sattellite pic terrain navigation (1) similar to genova (2)

1) Genova: http://www.genova.ch
2) A Genova implementation: http://www.sports-3d.com/

Having that said, if such endeavours are in effect at this time, I'd appreciate a few samples/links!

I'm also open to development discussions & theories that would get the project forward as I foresee much visibillity to Open Source communities the likes of Celestia in the aforementionned project.

As a commercially naive academic;-), I am not sure I grasped the plot behind your interest in Celestia entirely. By attracting OpenSource projects to your commercial WEBsite, are you planning to make money with the work others did for free?

Or do you just want to help the OpenSource community, by providing a platform so it may florish?

Bye Fridger

[LeCook]

As a commercially naive academic;-), I am not sure I grasped the plot behind your interest in Celestia entirely. By attracting OpenSource projects to your commercial WEBsite, are you planning to make money with the work others did for free?

Or do you just want to help the OpenSource community, by providing a platform so it may florish?

Bye Fridger

For one, a huge part of the project is for education purposes - So yes, you can look at it as a platform.

Also, I'm in charge of all development aspects of the site and as a rule, aside from decent visibility, a percentage of the overall budget goes in donations to the Open Source projects that were used in the making of the project.

But we have to have a working web-based model for that to happen... Hence my initial post.

[maxim]

We're not so much in need for buget donations, but for developer resources.

So if you, or someone related to your project, would like to implement a web layer for Celestia, that would be a very good starting point.

maxim

[t00fri]

As a commercially naive academic;-), I am not sure I grasped the plot behind your interest in Celestia entirely. By attracting OpenSource projects to your commercial WEBsite, are you planning to make money with the work others did for free?

Or do you just want to help the OpenSource community, by providing a platform so it may florish?

Bye Fridger

For one, a huge part of the project is for education purposes - So yes, you can look at it as a platform.

So do you plan to make money by educating others? Whom do you plan to educate? In what?

What does "huge" mean in practice? What percentage?

Also, I'm in charge of all development aspects of the site and as a rule, aside from decent visibility, a percentage of the overall budget goes in donations to the Open Source projects that were used in the making of the project.

What percentage? 1% 10%?

But we have to have a working web-based model for that to happen... Hence my initial post.

People in general would like to know first, what scheme you have in mind? You have been rather evasive so far, if I may say so

Bye Fridger

[LeCook]

We're not so much in need for buget donations, but for developer resources.

So if you, or someone related to your project, would like to implement a web layer for Celestia, that would be a very good starting point.

maxim

We're also considering that option, but the required development expertise is not our main strengh.

[LeCook]

So do you plan to make money by educating others? Whom do you plan to educate? In what?

We've already received wrd that govt funds will be committed to that end. As for the audience, the focus groups currently under way will determine the exact focus (avid sim enthusiats, pilots, kid, teenagers... It remains to to be seen)

What does "huge" mean in practice? What percentage?

(...)

What percentage? 1% 10%?

(...)

People in general would like to know first, what scheme you have in mind? You have been rather evasive so far, if I may say so

To give you an idea, we've got enough work for our local team of 3-5 folks over a course of 3 years. Even 1% of the overall project would be a sizeable portion in this case. I just can't go any further innumber at this time....

I have not been evasive on purpose and if I've given that impression it wasn't intentional... Suffice it to say that we're still at the exploratory phase and I'm eager to see more from the Celestia developer community

[Seb]

I'm a little new to Celestia, so forgive me if this has already been done.

Could a command line options be added which would take some parameters (or maybe a filename to some parameters) which tells Celestia a camera position, etc, but instead of starting the whole application running, returns (or creates) a .jpg of image of what would normally be shown on screen. (the url function does half of this)

This could then be incorporated into a website, where the parameters entered into a page which then returns an image back to the browser.

Example: Web pages could be made to view the night sky from specifc cities which would match up with what they saw out of their window, the difference being planets/stars are labeled.

Sebastian Gibbs

[john71]

I would NEVER use a web based Celestia, I would NEVER use a commercial version of it, if I can't have offline access. I would NEVER use a monthly paid version of any software. I would never use an Android game version of Celestia.

[John Van Vliet]

" browser's ActiveX control "

that will be a MAJOR issue and mostly unsolvable

apple and linux and BSD do not use MICROSOFT'S ( ms ONLY!!!) active X

and web based Active X is a SECURITY NIGHTMARE!!!!!! one can sail a Nimitz class aircraft carrier though

a very BAD idea to use active X

even on MS windows it SHOULD BE DISABLED!!!

[Hungry4info]

The idea of a web-based Celestia kind-of repulses me as well.

[Janus]

I do not believe there is any need what so ever to use ActiveX stuff in any form.
The bulk of celestia can be moved to WebGL.

I have seen several online star dispersion sites, most were clunky, slow, and short lived.
What they mostly lacked was any real flow, or design for usability, which Celestia has lots of.

The only hard part is porting the star database.
I suppose you could make an sqlite3 file out of it, but that seems messy, and has a lot of overhead.
As an alternate you could use CSV I guess, which works and I use it sometimes, but again, can get messy and complicated.

I would recommend some form of JSON though.
I use JSON in some of my software for passing messages and variables between a websocket server, and web browser clients, and it is fast.
Then all you would have to do is create the DB in memory once, and save it as a JSON file.
Then read/load/import that file into the web browser window, and it would just be there.

That would also mean using the current, or expanded 2 million star DB, not the new gaia billion star catalog.
That many sets of points and data takes a lot of memory, and has a complicated structure.

Janus.

[Coder206]

Hello!

I hope you are doing well. I was thinking it could be written in JS, perhaps it could use ThreeJS and support Mozilla A-Frame (https://aframe.io/) so that it could be a web-based VR visualization of space?

Best regards,

Coder206