Solar System Generator - 100,000 stars.
Well according to this:
http://www.ectaco.com/online/diction.ph ... &x=25&y=12
Its either jibberish or I have the incorrect fonts to translate...or the translator is trying to tell me pay for it...like everything on the internet nowadays...
http://www.ectaco.com/online/diction.ph ... &x=25&y=12
Its either jibberish or I have the incorrect fonts to translate...or the translator is trying to tell me pay for it...like everything on the internet nowadays...
I'm trying to teach the cavemen how to play scrabble, its uphill work. The only word they know is Uhh and they dont know how to spell it!
Hi Marc!
I have some considerations to do about you excellent work that generates zillions of planetary systems.
I downloaded the three files (textures, generator and executable if I remember well, now I'm at office...) and I tried first to generate 10 star systems before jumping into the whole generation.
At first I made a complete backup of my Celestia folder (> 2GB
) in another partition of my hard disk and in "that" folder I managed to work with your program: this way I had no modification of my original (and heavy) installation of Celestia (celestia-win32-1.3.2pre8.exe).
Now I have some questions
:
- in your installation you supersede some relevant files in the original Celestia installation (for example solarsys.ssc, asterism.dat, stars.dat, celestia.cfg) : I wonder why , because these files are very important to the system and change from time to time. For example when "Magic" Jestr
published his textures and models for many satellites in the solar system, I suddenly changed solarsys.ssc (I hope that it's the correct name...) in order to use those textures and models I like very much: now I don't want to abandon those changes ... 
.
- if I remember well, you use a modified version of Celestia, in order to handle the folder "Random" and its subfolders (more on this later...) and some new keywords in the famous solarsys.ssc. My question is: why didn't you use the method, used corrently by other add-ons maker, using "dsc" files if you need to create new stars or simply to change their names? And what about asterisms and constellations? I am quite confused
, apart from the fact that I was not able to run neither your mostly harmless exe nor my latest celestia exe (obviously copying them in the correct folders!): Celestia stops with a runtime error, mh starts and stops abruptly... 
So I got one of the zillion "gz" file (again, more on this later...) , I decompressed it and moved it, with its models and textures, into my original Celestia system, as if it were a common add-on: needless to say IT WORKS!!! This way I had no need to change anything in the original files!
Now I remember that you modified Celestia in order to read "gz" files: I think these modifications should be put into Celestia too...
- Now the in-famous folder "Random" : I have a Athlon 2.7GHz PC with 1GByte RAM.
Every time I tried to simply open the first subfolder with Explorer in order to see the monster list of 30000 files in it, my PC started crunching and after 3-4 minutes I had to kill the Explorer with Task Manager : in my PC I have NTFS file system. But I wanted to read those files so I created a small Visual Basic program that in a couple of minutes created 30 subfolders with 1000 files in each, repeating this for all the original subfolders. Now I have a lot of subfolders with 1000 files in them and now Explorer runs as usual, with no delay
- BTW reading the ssc files I noticed that there are lots of comments: I do like comments , but they are unnecessary if you want to handle maaaaaaany files without occupying GBytes of hard disk: have you considered to delete all the comments so files are smaller and there is no need to handle "gz" files with a different version? You could create a "sample" ssc file, full of comments, so users can easily understand astronomical facts inside those files...
Marc, apart from my comments, it should be clear that I liked very much your work : I think Celestia is the best program I have ever seen around .
So If you think my comments are useful I could help you in transforming your work in a real add-on.
Thanks for your attention!
Pierluigi
BTW I created another Visual Basic program that allows me to decide which add-on I want to use in Celestia: if anyone is interested in this argument I will consider arranging my code to distribute to all the Celestians all around the world!! This program is veeeeeery easy to use: the only difficulty is to arrange the hundreds of add-ons in the hard disk, but I have also found an elegant solution for this question!!!
Bye bye
I have some considerations to do about you excellent work that generates zillions of planetary systems.
I downloaded the three files (textures, generator and executable if I remember well, now I'm at office...) and I tried first to generate 10 star systems before jumping into the whole generation.
At first I made a complete backup of my Celestia folder (> 2GB
) in another partition of my hard disk and in "that" folder I managed to work with your program: this way I had no modification of my original (and heavy) installation of Celestia (celestia-win32-1.3.2pre8.exe).
Now I have some questions
:
- in your installation you supersede some relevant files in the original Celestia installation (for example solarsys.ssc, asterism.dat, stars.dat, celestia.cfg) : I wonder why , because these files are very important to the system and change from time to time. For example when "Magic" Jestr
published his textures and models for many satellites in the solar system, I suddenly changed solarsys.ssc (I hope that it's the correct name...) in order to use those textures and models I like very much: now I don't want to abandon those changes ... .
- if I remember well, you use a modified version of Celestia, in order to handle the folder "Random" and its subfolders (more on this later...) and some new keywords in the famous solarsys.ssc. My question is: why didn't you use the method, used corrently by other add-ons maker, using "dsc" files if you need to create new stars or simply to change their names? And what about asterisms and constellations? I am quite confused
, apart from the fact that I was not able to run neither your mostly harmless exe nor my latest celestia exe (obviously copying them in the correct folders!): Celestia stops with a runtime error, mh starts and stops abruptly...
So I got one of the zillion "gz" file (again, more on this later...) , I decompressed it and moved it, with its models and textures, into my original Celestia system, as if it were a common add-on: needless to say IT WORKS!!! This way I had no need to change anything in the original files!
Now I remember that you modified Celestia in order to read "gz" files: I think these modifications should be put into Celestia too...
- Now the in-famous folder "Random" : I have a Athlon 2.7GHz PC with 1GByte RAM.
Every time I tried to simply open the first subfolder with Explorer in order to see the monster list of 30000 files in it, my PC started crunching and after 3-4 minutes I had to kill the Explorer with Task Manager : in my PC I have NTFS file system. But I wanted to read those files
so I created a small Visual Basic program that in a couple of minutes created 30 subfolders with 1000 files in each, repeating this for all the original subfolders. Now I have a lot of subfolders with 1000 files in them and now Explorer runs as usual, with no delay
- BTW reading the ssc files I noticed that there are lots of comments: I do like comments
, but they are unnecessary if you want to handle maaaaaaany files without occupying GBytes of hard disk: have you considered to delete all the comments so files are smaller and there is no need to handle "gz" files with a different version? You could create a "sample" ssc file, full of comments, so users can easily understand astronomical facts inside those files...
Marc, apart from my comments, it should be clear that I liked very much your work
: I think Celestia is the best program I have ever seen around .
So If you think my comments are useful I could help you in transforming your work in a real add-on.
Thanks for your attention!
Pierluigi
BTW I created another Visual Basic program that allows me to decide which add-on I want to use in Celestia: if anyone is interested in this argument I will consider arranging my code to distribute to all the Celestians all around the world!! This program is veeeeeery easy to use: the only difficulty is to arrange the hundreds of add-ons in the hard disk, but I have also found an elegant solution for this question!!!
Bye bye
Hi Marc and Celestians!
After further investigations at home last evening, I add some comments: to summarize, I like your work very much, Marc!!!
Here are my new comments:
1) I used the batch file to generate 1000 nearest star systems after I renamed the previous "random" folder to "random (all)": I obtained 1000 gz files that I converted back to ssc by means of a Visual Basic program (I do like Visual Basic !!) and with another VB program I deleted all the comments from the 1000 ssc files: here are the results
- gz files occupy 9.23 MB
- fully commented ssc files occupy 78.5 MB
- ssc with only the header table (solar system details) occupy 31.4 MB
- ssc files, with no comments at all, occupy 28.5 MB
IMHO I prefer the latest ones (even without comments) because they are easily editable. AFAIK gz files are not readable by the original Celestia exe (I suppose, I have not tried it!
) so they are useless. And I think that 28.5 MB are not too much in order to have a quite populated universe: I have done no investigation on the full generation.
2) I noticed (for example in HIP 111313 or HIP 15457, but I suppose that every system has this problem) that on most planets (and even in the clouds, where present) there is the "polar pinch effect", that can be readily corrected doing some small modifications on the relevant jpg textures (more on this argument can be found in the forum, or simply asking to our texture gurus
...) : after these small corrections planets are quite real!
3) Am I missing something or there are no ringed planets at all?
4) Sorry, but there is a misspelling about asteroid textures: filenames are mh_asteriod__xx.jpg
5) Tips and Tricks: while I was working on the monster folders I found that in order to delete files from them, it is easier to use the "dos" window (cmd.exe): hundreds or even thousands of files disappear very fast, while in Explorer deletion requires a longer time. Also renaming lots of files is quite immediate
That's all folks
Pierluigi
After further investigations at home last evening, I add some comments: to summarize, I like your work very much, Marc!!!
Here are my new comments:
1) I used the batch file to generate 1000 nearest star systems after I renamed the previous "random" folder to "random (all)": I obtained 1000 gz files that I converted back to ssc by means of a Visual Basic program (I do like Visual Basic
!!) and with another VB program I deleted all the comments from the 1000 ssc files: here are the results
- gz files occupy 9.23 MB
- fully commented ssc files occupy 78.5 MB
- ssc with only the header table (solar system details) occupy 31.4 MB
- ssc files, with no comments at all, occupy 28.5 MB
IMHO I prefer the latest ones (even without comments) because they are easily editable. AFAIK gz files are not readable by the original Celestia exe (I suppose, I have not tried it!
) so they are useless. And I think that 28.5 MB are not too much in order to have a quite populated universe: I have done no investigation on the full generation.
2) I noticed (for example in HIP 111313 or HIP 15457, but I suppose that every system has this problem) that on most planets (and even in the clouds, where present) there is the "polar pinch effect", that can be readily corrected doing some small modifications on the relevant jpg textures (more on this argument can be found in the forum, or simply asking to our texture gurus
...) : after these small corrections planets are quite real!
3) Am I missing something or there are no ringed planets at all?
4) Sorry, but there is a misspelling about asteroid textures: filenames are mh_asteriod__xx.jpg
5) Tips and Tricks: while I was working on the monster folders I found that in order to delete files from them, it is easier to use the "dos" window (cmd.exe): hundreds or even thousands of files disappear very fast, while in Explorer deletion requires a longer time. Also renaming lots of files is quite immediate
That's all folks
Pierluigi
-
Topic authormarc
- Posts: 426
- Joined: 13.03.2002
- With us: 22 years 6 months
- Location: Outback Australia
I discarded the use of the gzipped ssc file a while ago and am now using the database to store planetary information. It solves the problem of too many files and uses 10% of the space. Can I ask what version you are running?
Marc Griffith http://mostlyharmless.sf.net
-
Topic authormarc
- Posts: 426
- Joined: 13.03.2002
- With us: 22 years 6 months
- Location: Outback Australia
OK, you might be on an older version. Latest is 0.3.0 and it runs independent of Celestia.
Marc Griffith http://mostlyharmless.sf.net
-
Topic authormarc
- Posts: 426
- Joined: 13.03.2002
- With us: 22 years 6 months
- Location: Outback Australia
OK, you might be on an older version. Latest is 0.3.0 and it runs independent of Celestia.
Marc Griffith http://mostlyharmless.sf.net