New UNOFFICIAL OS X Celestia Build (7-24-05)

[ElChristou]

...I can see the ! in Interface Builder (IB), but when I actually run Celestia the ! disappears.
I even tried setting the shortcut to "Shift-1" (which is !) but IB won't even let me do that.

I'll remove the backgrounds for the Set Time and Go To windows.

Got the same problem with the "!"... quite strange...

I will try something different for the Set Time and Go To panels... I will mail you the results.

Bye

[dirkpitt]

Also - you had noted you left out doctorjoe's foreground patch b/c of a bug? Did you also leave out his GO TO spaceship start-time patch?

I thought that patch had been committed to CVS along with several of the other patches but apparently it hasn't been. There have been a rash of changes to CVS recently, and I've stopped trying to sort things out.

[BlindedByTheLight]

...As for 2) I actually meant something that I read in the user's guide under Filter Stars:

This slider determines how many stars Celestia will draw at one time. It regulates star number by how far away a star is from your viewpoint. By default, it is set at 1,000,000 light years. Since the diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way) is about 100,000 LY across, Celestia will draw all stars in its data base at this slider setting. However, you can lower the slider and command Celestia to draw only closer stars. For example, if you set the slider to 100, the program will only draw stars that are within 100 light years of Earth. Since this requires far less computing power than the highest slider value, this may be useful if the program is running slowly for you. Lowering the slider will speed things up. Also, you may have a scientific need to only see the closest stars to your viewpoint.

I do not believe the Mac OS version has this functionaliy. Would be great, not only for stars, but galaxies also.

uh hemm... Steven you should play a bit with the star slider in the control panel... but yes, if the galaxy catalogue become very big, it would be cool to have the same setting for galaxies...

Hey all - just wanted to post here that I moved this question to its own topic... and it seems that the slider bar doesn't exactly do what we think it does...

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=56935#56935

[Startyger]

I am incredibly happy to see this...

i tried to put in a couple of black holes and discovered some stars don't show.....so, i can't get the black holes to work.... (Cygnus X-1)

[Cham]

I am incredibly happy to see this...

i tried to put in a couple of black holes and discovered some stars don't show.....so, i can't get the black holes to work.... (Cygnus X-1)

What do you mean, it doesn't work ? On my system, with the most recent built from Dirkpitt, CygnusX-1 is fully working.

[BlindedByTheLight]

Dirkpitt... just curious - how much of these experimental tweaks (preferences graphics, etc.) have been committed to CVS?

[dirkpitt]

Dirkpitt... just curious - how much of these experimental tweaks (preferences graphics, etc.) have been committed to CVS?

None, actually. How do people feel about these modifications anyway?

[BlindedByTheLight]

My two cents...

Splash screen is cool (much better than the prior) - though the silver-brushed theme on the borders I could personally do without - mostly b/c the silver-brushed theme is usually an Apple app theme - overdone, in my opinion and, it makes me think I've opened another iLife app - not a cool, non-Apple open-source project

Love the way you divided the preferences up into grids - that's a no-brainer to stay... but IMHO the background image is slightly distracting (not too bad, though).

The short-cut glyphs, of course, I love... that's a no-brainer, too, I think, to stay.

The Set-Time and Go-To windows... again, I like the recesses of the borders but the background images are little distracting (a bit more than the preference pane - here, the images really compete for my eye's attention). But, still, I'm at a loss for an alternative...

[Cham]

My two cents...

Splash screen is cool (much better than the prior) - though the silver-brushed theme on the borders I could personally do without - mostly b/c the silver-brushed theme is usually an Apple app theme - overdone, in my opinion and, it makes me think I've opened another iLife app - not a cool, non-Apple open-source project

Love the way you divided the preferences up into grids - that's a no-brainer to stay... but IMHO the background image is slightly distracting (not too bad, though).

The short-cut glyphs, of course, I love... that's a no-brainer, too, I think, to stay.

The Set-Time and Go-To windows... again, I like the recesses of the borders but the background images are little distracting (a bit more than the preference pane - here, the images really compete for my eye's attention). But, still, I'm at a loss for an alternative...

I agree with all of this. The background images are a bit like an hair on the soup. They are pointless.

About the silver around the splash screen, well it may be usefull. It let the user to place the image elswhere.

The browser window should remember it's position after each launch, IMO.


Dirkpitt :

There are few modification patches around which may be very usefull in your built. Especially the images on screen and the orbit selection things.

By the way, there's a small error in the French traduction of the word "coordinates". It's writen "coordon?©s", in place of "coordonn?©es".

[BlindedByTheLight]

About the silver around the splash screen, well it may be usefull. It let the user to place the image elswhere.

Yeah, I agree with Cham - I like having "handles" so I can move the splash-screen around - which I usually do... just saying I wasn't too keen on the iLife-ishness of them.

[ElChristou]

Hi guys,

Sorry I haven't followed the topic (quite busy with the shuttle), and as I am culpable for those modifs I fell I must give some explanations:

First the Splash; the metal look is not my choice for the texture, much for the rounded corners; the aqua style do not permit rounded corner in the bottom of windows (IMO all rounded corners are better for a splash which will be displayed a few seconds...). After using for the last weeks, I think that finally the metal texture works quite well with the pict and the loading state... About the possibility of moving the window, this has nothing to see with the look of the interface.

Now, the backgrounds images; I had this idea when I was using the location panel, which was quite a big blanck window which few settings; so the idea of the background was to fill the empty space with a light visual info.
Then by "contagion" I began to do the others... (and you haven't seen yet some others for warnings, about and quit panels... perhaps those won't never see the light...).
It's true this is a visual distraction, which is completly useless... the idea was to give a small plus to those panes so serious
Yet I can make those backgrounds lighter, or if people think it's better to remove then...

******

Dirkpitt,

Sorry, they are two corrections to do in French (I don't know if you have already coorct the first):

coordon?©s -> coordonn?©es
Se raprocher -> Se rapprocher

[ElChristou]

BTW, it would be cool to have more feedback from more OSX users...

[neo albireo]

Here's feeback from one more OSX user:

First the interface enhancements:

- I like the splash. The graphic is absolutely fantastic. The metal does not disturb me too much, though I would prefer it not to be there. But I see the point about moving the window. When you show Celestia with double screen modus (one screen for the properties etc., one for the universe) you want to know where the window displays.

- I like the background images.

Now for the new galaxy rendering:

- Great! I love it! And it's great you can pretend to have perfect night vision by adding luminosity to those galaxies. Until now you needed to show the galaxy names to get a clue about how many galaxies there are, but adding luminosity is a much nicer way to give a hint about the size of our galactical neighbourhood.

However there are a few things that aren't perfect yet (probably they have been discussed already somewhere else so I make it short):

- Galaxies are too bright when seen edge on, because dark clouds aren't implemented yet (at least that's what I guess)

- It would be nice to have the "(" and ")" keys as a similar bar like the visible stars bar in the preferences.

Thanks to all contributing people!!!
When I first used Celestia, it was already a piece of art and extremely beautiful. Since then it got even more beautiful and more and more user-friendly. Now I'm only hoping for someone to implement a preferences-option to choose the time needed for the goto-command and the center-command and a similar smooth behavior for the rotating around an object (it should start slowly and become faster when one is still pushing the button) when using the keyboard. Then all my initial wishes I had when I started using Celestia would have become true.

[BlindedByTheLight]

Now I'm only hoping for someone to implement a preferences-option to choose the time needed for the goto-command

Hey there Neo - if you are talking about a way to temporally go to the beginning of, say, the Mir space station, doctorjoe created a patch that does just that. You hit SHIFT-G and Celestia will take you there in both time and space. Unfortunately, it got left out of this latest version of Celestia, but if you go to:

stevenbinder.net

...you can find an earlier version that has that patch. And, I assume, some later versions will as well soon enough.

S

[neo albireo]

Hey there Neo - if you are talking about a way to temporally go to the beginning of, say, the Mir space station, doctorjoe created a patch that does just that.

Hi Blinded!

Sorry for my poor english, my intention was something else: With "time needed" I mean the time that the travel takes after hitting "g". Now it takes 5 seconds as default, which is far too fast if you watch it on a big screen with decent music. We have a little home cinema for 30 people and sometimes we travel through the universe with Celestia. It increases the elegance dramatically when you set the goto-time to 30 seconds and the "c" center command to 20 seconds. Of course this shouldn't be default though, but it would be a nice option. Now I'm permanently running a script (I found it in the forum, I'm at work now so I can't look up who did the initial script, but thanks anyway!) that reacts on "G" and "C" (capital letters) and does exactly this. Besides this, in the script the keys ">" and "<" set the distance to an object to a certain distance (in relation to the size of the object). This is very imortant because when hitting the usual keys for "nearer" and "further away", it can happen (with big texture sizes), that I end up 1m from the surface or very far away from the milky way after the screen didn't refresh for 5 seconds and the CPU is burning. With ">" and "<" the screen doesn't refresh well when loading new textures as well, but I will at least end up at the right position. But of course a script is not the best solution.
Blinded, thanks for giving this new push to the Mac community. I was following your evolution from a simple user to an active member and will hopefully one day follow your path (I'm writing on my thesis and shouldn't spend too much time with celestia). It was amazing to see how much help you get as soon as you show active interest. I definitely don't have the impression that the forum is dead as stated in other posts on the forum.

[warp]

Hello

I'm a Mac OS X user who recently stumbled across Celestia. I used 1.3 at first, but quickly moved to one of your 1.4 builds from February, because Celestia is only half the fun without being able to run scripts.

Unfortunately, I could not try out Dirk's latest unofficial build as the download site seems to be down (at least for me). Can maybe somebody put it up on some mirror somewhere? Or is there maybe a later build somewhere which already incorporates the fix for the galaxies-not-showing-up issue?

Thanks for your help!

[ElChristou]

Hello

I'm a Mac OS X user who recently stumbled across Celestia. I used 1.3 at first, but quickly moved to one of your 1.4 builds from February, because Celestia is only half the fun without being able to run scripts.

Unfortunately, I could not try out Dirk's latest unofficial build as the download site seems to be down (at least for me). Can maybe somebody put it up on some mirror somewhere? Or is there maybe a later build somewhere which already incorporates the fix for the galaxies-not-showing-up issue?

Thanks for your help!

Hello,

Have you tried BlindedByTheLight'spage?

http://www.stevenbinder.net/

In all case if it doesn't work, don't forget we will have soon (I hope) the new Toti/Fridger version with galaxies rendering...

Bye

[warp]

Hello,

Have you tried BlindedByTheLight'spage?

Yes, tried it, but it linked to the same page. I now pulled the sources from CVS and built the current version (but without any custom patches) myself. Thanks for your help, anyway!

[BlindedByTheLight]

Warp... some of the earlier builds on my page are still viable (with some cool patches) - albeit not with galaxy rendering... but I'm working on it.

[Startyger]

I like the galaxies.... clusters were showing before, and now. why can't i get nebulae to show? lol........yeah..i traded my 466 for a mini.... faster processer.. faster ram.... faster bus... lower calibur videocard.