Additional universe information patch completed

[jamarsa]

Karen, the problem Fridger has has nothing to do with you personnaly or with your programming skills. I think from what you've shown us everyone is convinced that you're a talented coder and that you could provide very valuable contributions to Celestia.

That's a good approach!! So why don't look at her code before trying to reject it? (don't you personally, of course)

The problem is that it looks like you're taking over the project, starting implementing features that may not be in line with the current project goals.

But, what are the current goals? There is a document of to-do accepted features and/or a joining list? Where? (I looked at sourceforge before writing this, and found none).

And how do you accept a new developer in the team? asking humbly for it? I thought the best way would be to propose new and good code, to be reviewed and accepted by the current team. But without a list of future features, It will be hard to hit one of the goals, so you only can propose the best you can do.

The way we usualy work is that proposed features are first discussed on the developpers list so that everyone as a chance to give his/her opinion, offer implementation advice, propose modifications and so on. Most often we come to a concensus, if not the final say is with Chris who initiated the project and is still the project leader.

Except if you want to get the Celestia community's opinion to support your new feature beforehand, the forum is not the best place to propose a patch.

Agreed!! that's the right way to do it!! So please direct her to open a Sourceforge account and make the proposal in the developer list; that's what she asked in her first post: where to send it. If you had pointed at Sourceforge ("read the last part of the FAQ, please"), we could have avoided the entire problem.

Of course if your patch is refused in the process and you still think it is worth working on, you're free to offer it to Mostly Harmless or to start your own fork.

Agreed again!! That's what I was trying to explain to Fridger in my previous posts. My awful English, maybe?



PS: I don't want to extend the war, only point at the misunderstandings and the way to correct them, enabling more people to add work to Celestia without angry responses. I think all help is welcome.

[Christophe]

Jamarsa,

I agree with most of what you said. Sadly other things have kept me from following this thread too closely and I came a bit late in the discussion.

Indeed the current project goals are not clearly defined anywhere, probably because it is a moving target and is re-assessed regularly during discussions on the forums or the list.

You're right again when you say that the process to join the developers team is not clear. There are no predefined rule, I suppose offering a bug fix or enhancement as a patch on the developers list and asking Chris for CVS write access would seem the logical thing to do for any candidate.

The list can be found on the SF page on the 'Lists' tab.

Fridger's style puts off some people but that's just that: style... Sadly Americans seem to be quite impermeable to irony in general and Fridger's humour in particular. Oh, now I'm patronizing again...

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Jamarsa,
Fridger's style puts off some people but that's just that: style... Sadly Americans seem to be quite impermeable to irony in general and Fridger's humour in particular. Oh, now I'm patronizing again...

Well, I'm a Brit, and we're supposedly rather good at irony - and I didn't spot any of that in Fridger's posts. All I saw there was condescension.

Regardless of 'cultural differences', I've interacted with many Europeans (including Germans) and in my experience there are rude ones and polite ones, just as there are in any culture. The odd misinterpretation is all very well and is to be expected occasionally, but IMO 'cultural differences' should never be used as a catch-all excuse for rude behaviour by anyone.

[Paolo]

To Chris (and to anyone that wants to give his positive contribute to this wonderful project)

Perhaps should be OT, but may I give a simple small idea?

Actually the Revison log page in Celestia official website collects all the features implemented and bug fixes. The todo file in CVS collects a list of the thing that will be done in the future.

Probably the Celestia Project needs only a simple schedule file . Better if available as a public web page like Revision log. This page shoud contain simply the list of the features that will be implemented in the future. For each feature could be specified:

- The title;
- A brief description;
- The expected implementation Version number;
- The coders involved on or the request for volunteers;

Expected release dates for the new versions are not needed. But would be very very appreciated.

So the project should give to the community an idea about the future implementations and a lot of redundant and repetitive feature requests will never arrive on forums.

New coders like Karen should contribute not only offering new ideas but implementing the unassigned features.

Take notice that the feature list should include also bug fixes and minor tasks like in todo file. Those ones should be assigned to novice Celestia coders as training to familiarize with Celestia coding standards and as evaluation of coder attitudes before starting with more challenging works.

What do you think about? I think that if this mechanism was implemented and published some time ago all this very long thread should never happen, and new talented coders and contributors like Karen should be attracted to join the developement team.

I should be very happy to hold and update this page on my website. Updating the status of feature request on my website is already almost something similar. But I think that should be even more better if a page is maintained on the official Celestia Website.

Chris, surely you already do something like this at least in your mind to manage your work and to coordinate the development team. So ...

Bye - Paolo

P.S. Another long italianized english post Sorry.

[jamarsa]

Paolo:


I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) that a mechanism already exists in the Sourceforge page: the TASKS tag. Look at here for an example:

http://sourceforge.net/pm/task.php?group_project_id=27640&group_id=29057&func=browse

As long as the development team is small, this is not necessary. But it would be a good way to keep everyone informed about the new features being implemented, and to assign small sub-tasks to new developers.

[Paolo]

Jamarsa

Yes. Something like that!
But Compiere is the one of the most active projects on SF and has about 40 contributors.
It is not exactly what was in my mind.
I still would prefer something more... simple and ... friendly.

But if for Chris is easier to use CVS integrated task list its ok!

Bye - Paolo

[granthutchison]

In case anyone has fretted over these things, here are some responses to the catalogue of parting side-swipes Karen took at various aspects of Celestia. I'm responding only to ones that reference things I have a particular interest in:

1) The reason maximum radius is currently displayed for irregular bodies in solarsys.ssc is because that's the way Celestia scales 3ds objects. In fact, for perfect scaling, it should be half the longest bounding-box axis. That, of course, isn't a greatly helpful statistic to display, and as Karen said it would be useful to shake loose Celestia's internal scale from the physical radii displayed on screen. But hard-coding the dimensions seems excessive and inflexible. Why not simply allow 3ds objects to be assigned both a BoundingBoxRadius and a Radius (or preferably three primary Radii) in the ssc file?

2) But mean radii are used for minormoons.ssc because no attempt is being made at present to model their shape - each one has the same blob assigned to it, so using a mean radius is about the best way to get an approximately correct size. This was an informed decision when I revised minormoons.ssc, not something born out of ignorance of how Celestia worked, as Karen seems to have deduced.

3) Amalthea's radius is in error by something like 6-8km because ... um ... looks like a typo or maybe old data to me. Reckon we could fix that by typing a new number into solarsys.ssc.

4) The temperature given for Venus is the radiative equilibrium temperature calculated from its albedo and distance from the Sun - as such, it's a pretty good estimate of the average temperature of the Venusian cloud-tops. This is, of course, compatible with the cloud-top temperatures we're pretty much forced to use for the various giant planets. It would be nice to see a surface temperature as well, and I've suggested in this forum before that the ssc could contain a "GreenhouseFactor" command, in kelvin, which would could be picked up by Celestia, added to the equilibrium temperature, and then used to display a surface temperature. I'd be astonished if this didn't work better at the end of the day than extrapolative curve-fitting that required hard-coding atmospheric pressure and composition.

5) There is, actually, support for oblate spheroids in Celestia, as anyone who has taken a look at Saturn or read through solarsys.ssc might be expected to know. Just type "Oblateness" into your planet definition.

From this list, you may guess that I do sympathise with Fridger's concerns at Karen's sudden eruption of "corrective" activity. If she'd made a couple of exploratory posts on this forum, what I've written above could have been passed on to her, and we could then have enlisted her help to improve these aspects of Celestia. Instead she arrived with her own array of fully-formed ideas and then, because they weren't received with undiluted enthusiasm, seems to have departed as rapidly as she came.
Forgive me, but that seems a little childish. Or is that just my reserved Scottish upbringing talking?

Grant

[Rassilon]

It doesnt matter what anyone does or says...There is in no way a chance Celestia can be destroyed by anyone...because chris (with a few others) of course has final say on anything...and well I havent seen him post in here so theres your answer...add away...the addons will always be made reversable by chris anyways...with on/off option buttons And like marc's addition...its a solo project in no way affiliated with the original source except he uses the engine to create his game...I think Fridger feels offended by the fact that he along with others have worked very hard on Celestia and when someone comes across with they can do it better it tends to start what we have seen in the previous pages...I find Fridger to be arrogent at times but it comes with having an ego...which we all fall prey to...Who will be first to admit they were wrong? I personally think all of us are guilty for letting it continue...then I suppose we are all to blame for the argument...not Rei and not Fridger...all of us...

I for one am all for a terrain generator...etc...all I ask is to keep the peace...

[Brendan]

I have an idea for Rei's extra info addition. Remember the fight over the texture for Pluto? Altsurfaces resolved that. So why not resolve this by adding check boxes to choose what information to display. What if somebody wanted to change the order of the lines of information? Maybe a list with up and down arrows to change the order of the lines could be added to the gui. I got this idea from the checkboxes for orbits.

This is my first post here so hello.

Brendan

[Paul]

From this list, you may guess that I do sympathise with Fridger's concerns at Karen's sudden eruption of "corrective" activity. If she'd made a couple of exploratory posts on this forum, what I've written above could have been passed on to her, and we could then have enlisted her help to improve these aspects of Celestia. Instead she arrived with her own array of fully-formed ideas and then, because they weren't received with undiluted enthusiasm, seems to have departed as rapidly as she came.
Forgive me, but that seems a little childish. Or is that just my reserved Scottish upbringing talking?

Well, your smattering of hyperbole might make it seem more childish than it was , but...

Having been in a few forums related to widely differing types of project development, one thing I've seen in all of them is the phenomenon of "blow-ins" - a person who will come in and propose broad change in a way that suggests over-confidence or possibly even naivete (especially if the task is deceptively difficult to implement, like dynamic terrain!). Such a person is likely to meet resistance, unfortunately their reaction needs to be only slightly immature for things to degenerate into a flame war between "newbies" and "old timers".

I speak of an intellectual immaturity, where one has trouble distinguishing between one's own point of view and others, and more seriously, an inability to make intellectual compromises (as opposed to a mere difficulty doing so, which almost all of us experience!).

To summarise, I partly agree with your point... but I would point out that such immaturity occurred on both sides - as they say, it takes two to tango

Cheers,
Paul

[granthutchison]

Well, your smattering of hyperbole might make it seem more childish than it was

I'm a bit distressed that you feel I was being hyperbolic - it's something I despise in this sort of discussion. And now, rereading what I wrote, I still can't see any examples of "extravagant and obvious exaggeration." What do you feel I've overcooked?

- as they say, it takes two to tango

For sure. But the one-sidedness of my remarks was deliberate - I felt "The Case Against Fridger" had already been covered in some detail (as usual ), whereas Karen's remarks were going entirely unchallenged.

Grant

[Don. Edwards]

Hmmmmmmmmmm!!!
I am keeping my mouth shut. No comment on the comments that were made by a certain member. Only to say this, things never really change do they


I think that sums it up!

Don.

[Darkmiss]

I'd like to know why people are allowed to wind people up enough to make them leave this forum.
I've seen it happen a few time lateley.

A lot of new members are beeing scares off, even bullied.

Why is this allowed to happen here

[jamarsa]

Oh please, stop throwing stones. Who of you didn't shout at other people for the sake of your pride? The right thing to do is achieve an agreement, not blame someone as a sort of sport, just because some of you got wounded in the past.

I want to defend Fridger. He is polite and helpful most of the time. He is very clever, and as most of the clever people, a bit proud of it.
He offers his expertise to you with both hands open, and all of you benefit from it. But he tends to overreact a little (and only sometimes) when you touch a few sensible points (again, most people share this), because he is passionate about his work. You must understand this when talking to him, and try to see his point too, while maintaining yours. The key is to achieve a medium point, where everyone is satisfied.

I wasn't in disagreement with Fridger's concerns at this point, only with the way to express them. I wanted him to see that people can work in their goals, and become ours only if we are convinced they are good enough. You only need to point at the proper method to to this.


Thanks for your patience,


Javier.

[t00fri]

After thinking for quite a while whether I should ever get back to
this disgusting "party after the fight", I decided to do it
one more time, to straighten out a few essential things.

1) I find it remarkable that among the people who have started to
throw "stones at me", those who use the biggest ones, seem to have
little or no knowledge about Celestia's code structure. My defenders so
far, are rather from the other side...

2) Most of you are probably unaware that from this discussion with
Karen you have only seen the "tip of the iceberg". For days, we had
already an extensive private email discussion going on. It was much
less "emotional" than the one in public, as you can see from a
typical, detailed letter I wrote her (cf below).

3) I should mention also that I am usually a diligent person. Before
making any jugements, notably in public, I take care to check
first, whether I can justify my claims. So I installed and tested
Karen's patch of course, and subsequently went through her code and
the so called "improvements" carefully. In a number of cases my own
conlusions agreed with Grant's above while there were significant
other reasons of disagreement with Karen's approach that Grant did
not discuss. These detailed findings where at the basis of my
criticism.

3a) Who of you "stone throwers" went through similar steps to form
your /own/ opinion about the real issue of the discussion? It is so easy
to remember "old bills" to be paid back in such coherent "stone
throwing events"...

4) Already last Sunday night, long before the "public fight" started
in this thread, I was about to give up my correspondence with
Karen, since there was no constructive progress whatsoever in our
discussion. I felt tired and also run out of time. So I handed our
entire correspondence over to Chris, who was in vacations. Here is
the start of my letter to Chris (note the date):

> Subject: Karen Pease...I am giving up;-)
> Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 01:13:54 +0200
> ...

> Chris:

> I am giving up! Can you handle her?
...
> If you do not watch out, you will not recognize Celestia anymore
> within a week or two;-).

> I just send you this "bulk" she generated within 2 days.

In his answer, Chris backed up most of my concerns about Karen's
proposed changes. Since Chris is the project leader, it is much easier
for him to block the discussion before it can reach this unpleasant
stage, but he was online only occasionally because of his vacations.


5) So here I display most of a typical letter, I wrote to Karen last
Sunday, July 13th, /before/ the public escalation took place. It's
for you to judge its style...[I just left out a few more personal
details.]

Karen:


> Ah, sorry. I don't have a CVS account. Is there anything special
> that I need to do to get access?

The CVS developing site is on SourcForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia

You do not need a CVS account on the level of patches. Only the "official"
developers that you can look up under "Developers [View members]" in the
upper right of this page, are authorized to write (commit) code into the main
Celestia archive.
...

You can browse the CVS archive interactively, display the diffs of particular
patches etc by clicking "Browse CVS"

And you can /download/, of course, the latest CVS archive code for writing
patches or building and running the latest Celestia executable. You must
install CVS on your machine, read the manual and look up the commands how to
do the download/code update. Are you developing in Windows or Linux? It was
Red Hat, right?

There is also a developers mailing list over which we usually do most of our
discussions on further steps to be taken. All major new implementations of the
code are discussed among us first.

"Celestia Developers" <celestia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>

This would also be a good place for circulating new patches.

In any case we all practice a certain careful and conservative attitude before
checking in new code.
...

Now turning to your detailed replies...

I can see your patch addressing several distinct issues /at once/ which makes
its discussion somewhat more involved. It is usually better to keep things
"apart":

1) Improvements in accuracy of certain values of parameters that do not involve
entering new physics/math formulations or approximations. This includes
spotting and replacing wrong values/typos etc as well.

2) Implementing new physical formulae that allow to /compute/ certain physical
data of celestial bodies from other available data.

3) New code that leads to new features in Celestia, like your verbose info
display.

Indeed, since about half a year, Celestia development has also entered a
second "maturing" phase, where we go through the code and the
underlying formulae again carefully and try to eliminate inaccuracies,
bugs, /and/ "phantasy".

This also happend on the level of "limit of knowledge" masks for our textures
that may be toggled ON|OFF.

Grant has been doing lots of work in the direction of tediously adjusting the
texture meridians and checking orbit parameters against our official resources
like

JPL's HORIZONS System (Ephemerides and orbital elements for more than
100,000
objects) http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.html

An excellent compendium you also find on Selden's pages.

We have jointly worked hard to eliminate all sorts of bugs until the delicate
mutual events were as accurate as they are now! I have recently introduced a
CPU-friendly "compromise" scheme to account for the light-travel delay when
timing precision events.

Any contributions in category 1) that spot and eliminate inaccuracies are
certainly most welcome, as long as the changes undoubtedly represent
/improvements/.

In case of "improvements" in category 2), however, I would certainly first want
to see a clear astrophysical discussion of the range of validiy of new formulae
involved as well understand its "derivation". Empirical relations that just
"happen to fit" certain data, I consider far from ideal.

In category 3) we usually discuss jointly the usefulness and design of any
proposed changes, notably if new classes have to be added etc. In case of
more extensive changes, patches are usually circulated for all of us to try out
first.

Concerning your new verbose data displays, I really would like to know from you
first, whether our /existing extensive info feature/ is correctly installed on
your system such that clicking on any

star, galaxy, cluster...:
-------------------------

opens the professionally authorized /Simbad/ site in your browser for that
object: containing further Java tools to display various additional specialized
catalogs, measure star distances, produce brightness histograms besides most
extensive spectral, temperature,... info!

e.g. like so
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-id.pl?pr ... HIP%209487

planet, moon:
------------------------
opens http://www.nineplanets.org/...

again with vast quantitative and official info and explanations.

similarly with asteroids and comets...
----------------------------------------

What can you really improve over this /modular/, professionally authorized and
automatically updated info data base system?

Certainly hardcoding such data into Celestia's core engine, I would consider a
"significant" step /backwards/!

If the presently incorporated feature does not work for you as described, I
would advice like a few days ago already, to first get to know Celestia a
little better, ...

Finally, concerning an implementation of gravity effects, this should be done
(if at all) via an /add-on design/ in order not to mix-in largely incorrect
physics ...If you want to account for /joint/ gravitational effects of several
competing bodies like in case of a spacecraft maneouvering in the jovian
system;-) you will soon realize that you badly run out of CPU resources, if it
is to be done /right/. You sure know that the inhomogeneities of the
gravitational field of jupiter due to its /non-spherical/ shape already
significantly affects the orbits of its moons. Now consider a spaceship of a
small mass in this "gravitationally polluted" jovian environment;-)...For
spacecraft etc. we do have implemented the so-called xyz orbits that can simply
be generated from NASA Horizons for arbitrarily fine time steps...cf. eg the
delicate Galilei-Amalthea encounter...

Karen, I hope, you will be reading and interpreting this mail in the right way.
It is certainly meant to be an encouragement rather than the opposite. But
Celestia would not be what it is, if its coding so far would have been done too
hastily...

Did Chris and|or Grant already respond about your patch? Chris is off for a few
days of vacations at present, but he carried his Laptop along.


Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

After thinking for quite a while whether I should ever get back to
this disgusting "party after the fight", I decided to do it
one more time, to straighten out a few essential things.

1) I find it remarkable that among the people who have started to
throw "stones at me", those who use the biggest ones, seem to have
little or no knowledge about Celestia's code and|or data structure. My defenders so
far, are rather from the other side...

2) Most of you are probably unaware that from this discussion with
Karen you have only seen the "tip of the iceberg". For days, we had
already an extensive private email discussion going on. It was much
less "emotional" than the one in public, as you can see from a
typical, detailed letter I wrote her (cf below).

3) I should mention also that I am usually a diligent person. Before
making any jugements, notably in public, I take care to check
first, whether I can justify my claims. So I installed and tested
Karen's patch of course, and subsequently went through her code and
the so called "improvements" carefully. In a number of cases my own
conclusions agreed with Grant's above while there were significant
other reasons of disagreement with Karen's approach that Grant did
not discuss. These detailed findings where at the basis of my
criticism.

3a) Who of you "stone throwers" went through similar steps to form
your /own/ opinion about the real issue of the discussion? It is so easy
to remember "old bills" to be paid back in such coherent "stone
throwing events"...

4) Already last Sunday night, long before the "public fight" started
in this thread, I was about to give up my correspondence with
Karen, since there was no constructive progress whatsoever in our
discussion. I felt tired and also run out of time. So I handed our
entire correspondence over to Chris, who was in vacations. Here is
the start of my letter to Chris (note the date):

> Subject: Karen Pease...I am giving up;-)
> Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 01:13:54 +0200
> ...

> Chris:

> I am giving up! Can you handle her?
...
> If you do not watch out, you will not recognize Celestia anymore
> within a week or two;-).

> I just send you this "bulk" she generated within 2 days.

In his answer, Chris backed up most of my concerns about Karen's
proposed changes. Since Chris is the project leader, it is much easier
for him to block the discussion before it can reach this unpleasant
stage, but he was online only occasionally because of his vacations.


5) So here I display most of a typical letter, I wrote to Karen last
Sunday, July 13th, /before/ the public escalation took place. It's
for you to judge its style...[I just left out a few more personal
details.]

Karen:

> Ah, sorry. I don't have a CVS account. Is there anything special
> that I need to do to get access?

The CVS developing site is on SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia

You do not need a CVS account on the level of patches. Only the "official"
developers that you can look up under "Developers [View members]" in the
upper right of this page, are authorized to write (commit) code into the main
Celestia archive.
...

You can browse the CVS archive interactively, display the diffs of particular
patches etc by clicking "Browse CVS"

And you can /download/, of course, the latest CVS archive code for writing
patches or building and running the latest Celestia executable. You must
install CVS on your machine, read the manual and look up the commands how to
do the download/code update. Are you developing in Windows or Linux? It was
Red Hat, right?

There is also a developers mailing list over which we usually do most of our
discussions on further steps to be taken. All major new implementations of the
code are discussed among us first.

"Celestia Developers" <celestia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>

This would also be a good place for circulating new patches.

In any case we all practice a certain careful and conservative attitude before
checking in new code.
...

Now turning to your detailed replies...

I can see your patch addressing several distinct issues /at once/ which makes
its discussion somewhat more involved. It is usually better to keep things
"apart":

1) Improvements in accuracy of certain values of parameters that do not involve
entering new physics/math formulations or approximations. This includes
spotting and replacing wrong values/typos etc as well.

2) Implementing new physical formulae that allow to /compute/ certain physical
data of celestial bodies from other available data.

3) New code that leads to new features in Celestia, like your verbose info
display.

Indeed, since about half a year, Celestia development has also entered a
second "maturing" phase, where we go through the code and the
underlying formulae again carefully and try to eliminate inaccuracies,
bugs, /and/ "phantasy".

This also happend on the level of "limit of knowledge" masks for our textures
that may be toggled ON|OFF.

Grant has been doing lots of work in the direction of tediously adjusting the
texture meridians and checking orbit parameters against our official resources
like

JPL's HORIZONS System (Ephemerides and orbital elements for more than
100,000
objects) http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.html

An excellent compendium you also find on Selden's pages.

We have jointly worked hard to eliminate all sorts of bugs until the delicate
mutual events were as accurate as they are now! I have recently introduced a
CPU-friendly "compromise" scheme to account for the light-travel delay when
timing precision events.

Any contributions in category 1) that spot and eliminate inaccuracies are
certainly most welcome, as long as the changes undoubtedly represent
/improvements/.

In case of "improvements" in category 2), however, I would certainly first want
to see a clear astrophysical discussion of the range of validiy of new formulae
involved as well understand its "derivation". Empirical relations that just
"happen to fit" certain data, I consider far from ideal.

In category 3) we usually discuss jointly the usefulness and design of any
proposed changes, notably if new classes have to be added etc. In case of
more extensive changes, patches are usually circulated for all of us to try out
first.

Concerning your new verbose data displays, I really would like to know from you
first, whether our /existing extensive info feature/ is correctly installed on
your system such that clicking on any

star, galaxy, cluster...:
-------------------------

opens the professionally authorized /Simbad/ site in your browser for that
object: containing further Java tools to display various additional specialized
catalogs, measure star distances, produce brightness histograms besides most
extensive spectral, temperature,... info!

e.g. like so
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-id.pl?pr ... HIP%209487

planet, moon:
------------------------
opens http://www.nineplanets.org/...

again with vast quantitative and official info and explanations.

similarly with asteroids and comets...
----------------------------------------

What can you really improve over this /modular/, professionally authorized and
automatically updated info data base system?

Certainly hardcoding such data into Celestia's core engine, I would consider a
"significant" step /backwards/!

If the presently incorporated feature does not work for you as described, I
would advice like a few days ago already, to first get to know Celestia a
little better, ...

Finally, concerning an implementation of gravity effects, this should be done
(if at all) via an /add-on design/ in order not to mix-in largely incorrect
physics ...If you want to account for /joint/ gravitational effects of several
competing bodies like in case of a spacecraft maneouvering in the jovian
system;-) you will soon realize that you badly run out of CPU resources, if it
is to be done /right/. You sure know that the inhomogeneities of the
gravitational field of jupiter due to its /non-spherical/ shape already
significantly affects the orbits of its moons. Now consider a spaceship of a
small mass in this "gravitationally polluted" jovian environment;-)...For
spacecraft etc. we do have implemented the so-called xyz orbits that can simply
be generated from NASA Horizons for arbitrarily fine time steps...cf. eg the
delicate Galilei-Amalthea encounter...

Karen, I hope, you will be reading and interpreting this mail in the right way.
It is certainly meant to be an encouragement rather than the opposite. But
Celestia would not be what it is, if its coding so far would have been done too
hastily...

Did Chris and|or Grant already respond about your patch? Chris is off for a few
days of vacations at present, but he carried his Laptop along.


Bye Fridger

[marc]

It doesnt matter what anyone does or says...There is in no way a chance Celestia can be destroyed by anyone...because chris (with a few others) of course has final say on anything...and well I havent seen him post in here so theres your answer...add away...the addons will always be made reversable by chris anyways...with on/off option buttons And like marc's addition...its a solo project in no way affiliated with the original source except he uses the engine to create his game...I think Fridger feels offended by the fact that he along with others have worked very hard on Celestia and when someone comes across with they can do it better it tends to start what we have seen in the previous pages...I find Fridger to be arrogent at times but it comes with having an ego...which we all fall prey to...Who will be first to admit they were wrong? I personally think all of us are guilty for letting it continue...then I suppose we are all to blame for the argument...not Rei and not Fridger...all of us...

I for one am all for a terrain generator...etc...all I ask is to keep the peace...

I agree with you on all points Rass.
I am very interested in Karens terrain generator for my game. Though I've already done it I am interested in her ideas on implementing gravity too. (I've been busy, will email you soon Karen.)

She must be very talented, it has taken me a year of spare time to get this familiar with the celestia code.

I partly wrote my MySQL star database addon so that it might be added to Celestia if Chris really wanted it. Mostly I wrote it for myself. It still needs a lot more work before it would be suitable anyway.

[Paul]

For sure. But the one-sidedness of my remarks was deliberate - I felt "The Case Against Fridger" had already been covered in some detail (as usual ), whereas Karen's remarks were going entirely unchallenged.

That sounds more like an excuse to fan the flames than anything. We are a forum of intelligent people who can spot character assassination, thank you very much, and this isn't it. Nobody should interfere in situations by posting one-sided rants to try and even it up - because all it does is up the ante.

Cheers,
Paul