maxim wrote:If your co-workers ar software development pros, they will understand what I've meant above. And they will know that implementation will require quite some prerequisite work.
I have the extreme misfotune of being one of Appolonian's "software development pro" co-workers. (just kidding, Richard) There is a great deal of interest where we are at NASA about using Celestia as a visualizer for real-time space sims - it's pretty, and it's already written
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Warning: I have not gone source hacking yet, so the following is based on hearsay and rumor of how Celestia works! Even worse, I am not an astronomer or AE, so my knowledge of the entire subject matter is rather spotty, to say the least. I have written a visualizer before, so at least that much of this is not beyond my ken (mostly).
Anyways, from what I gather of this discussion, making Celestia "real-time capable" is going to require a few steps:
1. Creating a "real-time" mode that locks the time-slider into "normal speed".
2. Figuring out how to tell Celestia to not read a trajectory from a file loaded into memory, but rather from a class (interface?) of my own defining - this could be memory, middleware, or whatever,
3. Some method of choosing between file input and network input, and then configuring the network or file input appropriately.
The first should be reasonably easy, and I don't worry much about it. (famous last words)
The second is where things would appear to get tricky. How and where is the spacecraft trajectory stored?
The third is tougher than one, but still (presumably) straightforward.
If anyone has any suggestions for specific classes/files I should look at, that would be tremendously helpful. I will try my best to send patches back if I ever get this work done.
Anyways, thanks for your help!
