School Tour Possibility

[A.PELLONI]

Happy to meet this Forum for the first time.
I have used Celestia for 2 days only, and I'm absolutely astonished by its teaching capabilities.
At our Observatory in Italy (157 Frasso Sabino) we take weekly lessons for the students of all the schools in the territory, from children aged 5 to young boys 18 years old.
We use GUIDE8 to prepare movies on various themes, but Guide absolutely cannot be compared with celestia for easyness and speed of movements, capability to observe the various objects from all the points of view.
And so here is my problem:
I have seen the file containing the various scripting commands, but I have found nothing else on the way to use them.
Do I need some kind of programming software? Is there any help on the matter that I missed?
Thank you for your patience!
Andrea

[Guest]

I'm no expert on the scripting files, but here's some info to get you started.
You do not need any special software. You type in the commands in a notepade document and save the file with the extension ".cel". By far the best way to see how to type in and use the commands is to have a look at some of the existing .cel files such as the demo and startup. For some reason, you have to use { brackets a lot - the best way to figure out where these go is to read the existing files.
It would be nice in a future version if some kind of sub-program was available for creating .cel files without having to type them - I am imagining some kind of drop-down choose command/object menu system.... until then, if anyone could provide more advice Id much appreciate it !


(Mad Boris)

[The Clickman]

It would be nice in a future version if some kind of sub-program was available for creating .cel files without having to type them - I am imagining some kind of drop-down choose command/object menu system.... until then, if anyone could provide more advice Id much appreciate it !

Another idea : a "script recorder option". A way to record all actions we make in Celestia, then save this to cel file

[fjsummers]

Is there another way to load a .cel file than to simply replace the demo.cel and
use the "D" command? I would suspect not, but it would be a nice feature,
especially if the users develop a suite of interesting scripts.

As for the "script recorder option", I think it would be sufficient if the software
would allow you to dump to a file the current settings. You could travel to the
various points for your script and dump their info. Then edit that file
to make a smooth script for playback.

I presented Celstia to my son's kindergarten class (6 year olds) and they
loved it. The ability to script out a "lesson" would be a great help for the
teachers, as they are generally don't have time to learn software and the
details of astronomy. 3D is the only way to develop the correct mental
model of the solar system in the kids' heads.

[chris]

Is there another way to load a .cel file than to simply replace the demo.cel and
use the "D" command? I would suspect not, but it would be a nice feature,
especially if the users develop a suite of interesting scripts.

In Celestia 1.2.4 for Windows, there's an option under the File menu to load and run a script. This feature will also appear in the next release of Celestia for other platforms.

--Chris