Celestia Forums

SiriusCG wrote:Before I plunge headfirst into coding for Celestia, I have a few questions:

Is there a "idea submission" protocol for adding/modifying code in Celestia?
What is the proper way to contribute to the coding effort?
Is there a current or definitive roadmap that describes areas already under consideration for change or inclusion in Celestia?

Thx.

chris wrote:

SiriusCG wrote:Before I plunge headfirst into coding for Celestia, I have a few questions:

Is there a "idea submission" protocol for adding/modifying code in Celestia?
What is the proper way to contribute to the coding effort?
Is there a current or definitive roadmap that describes areas already under consideration for change or inclusion in Celestia?

Thx.

The Celestia WikiBook has a few pages describing areas of work. This one is the most up to date:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/151Features

Another thing to do is simply to use Celestia for a while--you'll probably come up with a list of a few items that would make the program more enjoyable and easy to use. Discuss them here in the development forum to see what the devs and other users think.

Something I think would be nice are more accurate ephemerides for a few natural satellites. Or, if you're into UI programming, you can work on the Qt4 front-end. Whatever you decide, definitely do discuss it here first: there are a few people who've spent 5+ years in the Celestia code base that can give suggestions on the best way to proceed on any given task.

--Chris

Or, if you're into UI programming, you can work on the Qt4 front-end.

SiriusCG wrote:Thx Chris for the pointers. I'll certainly take a look at the list.

Or, if you're into UI programming, you can work on the Qt4 front-end.

Ok, this brings up another question. What if I wanted to suggest an alternative to Qt4? In another thread, I suggested glgooey as an alternative UI as it's OpenGL based among other reasons.

Are major decisions like the choice of Qt4 already committed?
Or, if I created a successful glgooey-based UI independently, would/could it be integrated possibly as a user-selectable UI?

Please pardon my questions but I want to be sure to get off on the right foot with the devs and community.

I have concerns that glgooey is not adequate for Celestia's UI needs. We need a UI toolkit that's well-documented and well-supported. The glgooey project site on SourceForge shows that the most recent version (0.10) was uploaded in August 2004. That tells me that the toolkit is not actively supported, and that we'll have to fix any bugs ourselves. It's true that Qt4 is bigger, but in my opinion that's a small price to pay for the extra features, documentation, and support. Qt4 is also more than just a UI toolkit--by choosing it, we also get a cross-platform networking and threading libraries, both of which are in Celestia's future.