General Informations About Celestia Development

Paolo · Post #1by **Paolo** » 11.12.2002, 21:53

Hey Chris,

I like Celestia very much, for me is a dream that becomes reality. I've posted only a few times but since June I'm following the Celestia forums practically every day. I have some questions for you because I have a lot of expectations on Celestia and I see that the things are running slow.

Can you please update us about the situation of the celestia development?

Is the 1.2.5 release finished? When the source code will be available? When the website and source forge will be updated? (Please remember to include all the source in the next distribution for the win users, also jpeglib, libpng, zlib etc.)

Have you got an updated wish list compiled with the users requests sorted by preference number?

What are you working on at the moment?

Are you alone developing the code of Celestia or other people is involved?

I've never seen an help request from you on the forums. For example, do you need a hand for the preparation of the base package? for code maintenance? for code development? for code debugging? for platform compatibility? for models development? for textures? for web site maintenance? for reference documentation writing etc.? Let us know if we can help.

I've seen other projects similar to Celestia. Some of these recently are dead. Why don't you contact the other developers to share the knowledge, code and/or merge partially or totally the projects? This should result in development costs optimization and speed up. I'm saying you this because a few years ago I've started a similar project oriented to game development. It is dead because it become too large for me alone.

Darkmiss · Post #2by **Darkmiss** » 11.12.2002, 23:16

Actually Id like to see a few more forum pages if possible.
one just for updated news and anouncments (read only)

and maybe a wish list forum.

Post #3by **t00fri** » 12.12.2002, 00:26

Paolo wrote:Hey Chris,

I like Celestia very much, for me is a dream that becomes reality. I've posted only a few times but since June I'm following the Celestia forums practically every day. I have some questions for you because I have a lot of expectations on Celestia and I see that the things are running slow.

Can you please update us about the situation of the celestia development?

Is the 1.2.5 release finished? When the source code will be available? When the website and source forge will be updated? (Please remember to include all the source in the next distribution for the win users, also jpeglib, libpng, zlib etc.)

Have you got an updated wish list compiled with the users requests sorted by preference number?

What are you working on at the moment?

Are you alone developing the code of Celestia or other people is involved?

I've never seen an help request from you on the forums. For example, do you need a hand for the preparation of the base package? for code maintenance? for code development? for code debugging? for platform compatibility? for models development? for textures? for web site maintenance? for reference documentation writing etc.? Let us know if we can help.

I've seen other projects similar to Celestia. Some of these recently are dead. Why don't you contact the other developers to share the knowledge, code and/or merge partially or totally the projects? This should result in development costs optimization and speed up. I'm saying you this because a few years ago I've started a similar project oriented to game development. It is dead because it become too large for me alone.

I am somehow confused about your letter. If you are following this forum for a long time you should have easily found out meanwhile who are the people besides Chris involved in the development. If you had a project yourself, you should sure know how to look for progress in
http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia

You can browse the CVS sources very conveniently, find out the developers, find out about our frequent recent updates, and get answers to most of your further questions.

Progress is not at all slow, there is simply a lot of work to be done "after office hours" for all of us...

Bye Fridger

Rassilon · Post #4by **Rassilon** » 12.12.2002, 00:47

I think introductions of all devs for Celestia is in order....Some will still miss those bits of info...

Paolo · Post #5by **Paolo** » 12.12.2002, 09:04

To T00fri
I'm sorry for my English, I know that request should appear a little bit confused. :oops:

Looking at the the forums in these months I've seen that except Chris, the people more involved are you (T00fri), Railsson, Selden, Billybob884 and Darkmiss. A few others are very active too.
My question was born because in the sourceforge.net the list of developers includes people that I've never seen to post in the forums.
The situation of official and non-official developers is not clear. Knowing who are actually the people behind this wonderful program and what is their role is still a mine curiosity.
I don't want to waste your time I can imagine very well that the work is very huge, so I deduced that you should need a hand.

Are you alone developing the code of Celestia or other people is involved?

But the original question was more specific and oriented to who is writing and maintaining the official C++/Opengl core code.

Bye

Post #6by **t00fri** » 12.12.2002, 11:45

Paolo wrote:To T00fri
I'm sorry for my English, I know that request should appear a little bit confused. :oops:
Looking at the the forums in these months I've seen that except Chris, the people more involved are you (T00fri), Railsson, Selden, Billybob884 and Darkmiss. A few others are very active too.
My question was born because in the sourceforge.net the list of developers includes people that I've never seen to post in the forums.
The situation of official and non-official developers is not clear. Knowing who are actually the people behind this wonderful program and what is their role is still a mine curiosity.
I don't want to waste your time I can imagine very well that the work is very huge, so I deduced that you should need a hand.

Are you alone developing the code of Celestia or other people is involved?

But the original question was more specific and oriented to who is writing and maintaining the official C++/Opengl core code.

Bye

Yes that is where my confusion arose mainly (not from your English).

Since you wrote you were/are yourself developing software, I was wondering why you did not answer these questions yourself right away in the standard manner:

(Once again):

Click on
http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia

Then you click on 'developers[View Members]' on the upper rhs of the page. The listed 6 people have write-permission for checking in code into the Celestia CVS archive.

Furthermore, at the bottom, you may click on 'Browse CVS'. This allows you to browse at any time the most actual code, learn who has made what kind of code checkins, look at the diffs, look at the files AUTHORS, TODO, Changelog..., find out how often the changes are taking place as well as much further info. In short: you find precise answers to virtually all your questions above;-)

You may even get quantitative|statistical info on the 'liveliness' of the project etc. As a result you see that the Celestia development is very much alive.

You may download the complete CVS sources at any time and compile them yourself within any of the supported OS's.

These things are the same for any OpenSource development project nowadays...

And I am sure you are aware that Celestia is not a commercial venture? (strangely, you mentioned 'cost-effectiveness' in your above mail ??)

Most of the communication about Celestia code development, debugging etc. proceeds via a Celestia-developers mailing list. Again, a standard setup.

Bye Fridger

billybob884 · Post #7by **billybob884** » 12.12.2002, 12:38

Paolo wrote:the people more involved are you (T00fri), Railsson, Selden, Billybob884 and Darkmiss

Paolo · Post #8by **Paolo** » 12.12.2002, 14:26

To T00fri
Thank you for your patience and your explanations.
All the misunderstanding is started because I was focused on celestia forums and not on sourceforge. :oops:

Before your suggestions I've visited surceforge.net only superficially.
Now I' ve found what I need to satisfy my curiosity.
I'was never involved in an open source project so, I am a newbie about CVS argument. Today I've learned something new.

I was a programmer, now I am only an Delphi amateur but in my actual job I'm focused on costs optimization so I've used this concept as a professional bias. :roll:

Bye

Rassilon · Post #9by **Rassilon** » 14.12.2002, 19:03

Heres my 2 cents...And being a newbie at one time as well....I encourage asking questions....I also encourage the use of the search option...I think a new order should be in place...If someone asks a question and generally all new people will ask one or two questions that will be considered overdone or asked a million times...If you dont want to answer it...dont...I hate to see people leave this project because they feel unwelcome because I definately would not like even one be turned away from Celestia because of that...

The purity of Celestia is non-commercial....There is however one basis of purity in commercialism and that is non-profit....The spirit of this software is held by many who work on and with it....I can easily say this software has changed my life forever....And I want all to share in that revelation....

If we never lose sight of that it will always reman so...Everyone is welcome...

My intentions of course is not to 'rattle anyones cage' just want to keep things in perspective for myself as well as the community....