Celestia for Windows 10

The place to discuss creating, porting and modifying Celestia's source code.
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Markerz
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Celestia for Windows 10

Post #1by Markerz » 09.04.2021, 12:05

UWP stands for Universal Windows Platform, it was the attempt from Microsoft to unify its eco-system. Although with the fall of Windows Phone, there is not much "universal" in UWP, it is still one of the preferred ways to make Windows apps and it gives an app a modern look on Windows.

Win32 limited Celestia to only Windows desktop, so there was the idea to bring Celestia to UWP, hopefully Celestia gets to run on where any UWP app runs. For example, on an Xbox.

So here is how it looks, and you can grab it on Microsoft Store if you are running Windows 10 1803 or later.

Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 12.48.05 PM.png


UWP is a walled garden, so there are lots of limitations...

1. No OpenGL. UWP apps cannot use OpenGL, so has to use ANGLE to render OpenGL ES. As a result current Lua scripts involving drawing will not work.
2. No access to read from/write to arbitrary folders. For customization, read Wiki.
3. Very bad multi-window support. There is support for multi-window, however so bad that I did not use it in this build at all.

And yeah it is open source on github. Core of Celestia is wrapped in a C++/WinRT (can be used in C++/C#/JavaScript) library and UI written in C#.

I'm hoping that we could move to WinUI when ANGLE supports WinUI, the migration path should be fairly simple from UWP.

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Art Blos M
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Post #2by Art Blos » 09.04.2021, 12:56

I have a version Windows 10 LTSC and therefore Microsoft Store is not available. How do I download the installer then?
Founder and head of the project "Celestia Origin"

Topic author
Markerz
Developer
Posts: 274
Joined: 29.01.2009
Age: 29
With us: 15 years 9 months
Location: Suzhou, China

Post #3by Markerz » 09.04.2021, 14:17

Art Blos wrote:How do I download the installer then?

So here is the raw msix, https://github.com/levinli303/CelestiaUWP/releases/tag/2_0_1_0

And a guide to sideload UWP apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/applicat ... nt/sideload-apps-in-windows-10

Let me know if it works for you


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