Celestia Forums

MacOS X Users:

What are your priorities for bug fixes and/or new features in the upcoming versions of Celestia for MacOS X?

- Hank

Mmm..

I haven't used Celestia for some time, but I would like to see :

1) bumpmap support

2) cel URLs support

Hi Hank,

My favorite improvement would be a more complete preloading of textures. I have added a preload for all solar system planets and moons to my startup.cel but this loads only the basic textures, not e.g. the specular maps. Thus it still causes a hiccup when earth (and some other objects) come into view. (I have already disabled bump maps, for obvious reasons.)

But I guess you are more interested in OS X specific improvements. There my suggestion would be to first get the basic fuctionality right. Most important would be the proper display of textures. Many textures now are "shimmering", at least on my 1GHz Ti-book. (Example: ISS.) Bumpmaps would also be nice, although I am not sure they will work on an ATI chip. And of course the keyboard input needs a bit of work still, but looking at the code you are already actively working on that.

As far as the goodies are concerned, I really would like to see the eclipse calculator implemented. I had the good fortune to be present at the 1999 eclipse and they are an incredible experience. But, as I said, basic functionality is the most important.

I have been playing around with the 1.3.1 code a bit and I must say that I'm really impressed with what the Celestia team has already produced. I wished that I was a bit more fluent in C++ and Objective C so I could be more helpful.

Harrie

P.S. Ring shadows don't seem to be working in 1.3.1 although I think they worked in earlier versions. Does this have something to do with the texture problems?

I have not been able to get the addons feature to work. That needs to work. I am using 1.3.0-a1.

Homer

It would be good if celestia didn't use CPU time when it was paused. The windows version does it too but it will need OS specific code.

I'd love to see the MySQL interface working...

Hi, I'd like to see a "Capture Movie" option. Thanks for the great work.

Quick Time Movie Capture With Variable fps and Image Size.

Even with almost the most powerful Mac and video card, video capture with a second appliction is inconsistent and rough resulting from many dropped frames in the capture.

Built in video capture could, potentially, solve this problem by fully capturing each frame at the expense of real time celestia performance.


Details
__________________________

I am trying to capture 960 x 540 images at 30 fps for import into Final Cut Pro conversion to 16:9 rectangular pixel anamorphic images.

I have tried using Celestia 1.3.1 with Snapz Pro Movie Capture on a borrowed dual G5 2GHz with ATI Radeon 9600 XT, rendering path MultiTexture. 1G RAM, Mac OS X 10.3.5

I get 85fps with VT Jupiter and Io moving. This drops to between 36fps and 60fps when I start capture with Snapz Pro at 30 fps.

However. The result is that Snapz Pro does not get enough resources to capture all the frames. Resulting in a very jerky output. Many dropped frames in the movie capture.

So that even with almost the best Mac Gear reasonable video capture is not possible.

I am considering this thread on process priority http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4510 realitive to changing the process priority in the task manager and/or enabling vsync feature for OpenGL.

Resources
_________

Previously posted as guest ScottB in:
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1703&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=150

Breve 1.9.1 ( Mac OS X 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life ) GNU General Licence has video capture implemented under the file menu. I thought the implementation in Breve might provide a useful prototype for quicktime movie capture.

http://www.spiderland.org/breve/

I understand the limitations on time and resources.
I offer this as constructive research.


-- Scott

Mac OS X 10.3.5 :: Nvdia GForce4 MX 32 MB :: Dual 867MHz G4 :: Celestia 1.3.1

Hi Hank!

Thanks a lot to you and all other developpers for the fantastic work you did and still do!
I'm usually enjoying Celestia sessions with a home cinema video projection in a totally dark room. Gives my friends and me a real flying feeling...

To answer your question: Here's my list of wishes (although I don't know which of those points are OS X only)

1) bumpmap support

2) saving of preferences

3) cel URLs support

4) addons switch menu / solar system navigation menu (read about it somewhere, don't remember the right name, seems to be working with the windows-version only)

Thanks a lot! Looking forwards to 1.3.2!!!

Marco

Hi,
My big chance!
Features I would request include....

- Presently dimmed-out or unsupported menu items to be available:
Locations
Solar Systems
Star Browser
Tour Guide
Help

- CELX support

- A command-key for "Run Script" like "command-R"

- Smoothed and/or selectable fonts for Info Display

- Ablility to hide/show all bodies seperately (moons, asteroids, etc. I suspect this is not a Mac-thing, tho)

Thanks,
Rich

Oh Yeah, I just remembered -

Also, I can't currently use the Gusev and Stonhenge 3D models for Mars and Earth surfaces.... it'd be a nice addition to have these and other surface features like them available!

Also... still not sure if this is a mac problem or not, but I can't seem to have nitelites and bumps at the same time; niltelites stay on even in bright parts of earth when I have bump or normalmaps enabled.


-Rich

Render Modes: Sync to Refresh and Line & Edge Anti-Alising

Macs are shipped with either Radeon or nVidia video cards.
The after market Radeon cards can be tweaked with a Radeon Utility ( http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/mac/macos10-2-ATI-displays.html ) to over ride the program settings and turn on "Sync to Screen Refresh", "Line & Edge Anti-Alising" and some other worth while features for Celestia.

For most OEM Mac video cards the Radeon utility does not work.

As far as I know, in Mac OS X, there is no other easy way to provide these instructions to the video card outside of the program itself.

It would improve imaging, for both stills and video capture, if such video card settings could be set from within Celestia.

-- Scott
Mac OS X 10.3.5 :: Nvdia GForce4 MX 32 MB :: Dual 867MHz G4 :: Celestia 1.3.1

Uhhh, guys?
I don't mean to be rude, but have you noticed how long ago an actual Mac deveoper posted here? There's noit much point in requesting features to empty space.
While I am sure that we can all dream of features that woudl be really cool, Celestia is long on ideas and short on implementation. You don't have to know how to help with the rendering code to contribute. We can always use more people on the motherlode or iwth any of the other sub-projects going on.

Cheers,
Joe

alphap1us wrote:I don't mean to be rude, but have you noticed how long ago an actual Mac deveoper posted here?

What, they really exist?

alpha1us wrote:I don't mean to be rude, but have you noticed how long ago an actual Mac deveoper posted here?

But perhaps they might be lurking here.

Hi Hank,
Thanks for letting us know you're still around. If you could find the time to do any more work on the Mac version, I think it would advance the cause a lot to just compile the source at the time of the Windows 1.3.2 release so that Mac users have support for CMOD formats and any fo the other internal improvements that were recently made to the code base. I am assuming of course that such a thing would be relatively simple to do. I tired to do tthis myself a couple weeks ago, but I was not able to get past the first error that ocurred.

Cheers,
Joe

Joe,

As a matter of fact, I have successfully built a Mac OS X version of Celestia from the 1.3.2 source and although I haven't done much testing it looks pretty good on my G4 under 10.2 so I expect to make it available at SourceForge on an "as is" basis sometime soon. There are no Mac-specific improvements (all the missing features are still missing, unfortunately) but it will include all the recent improvements to the Celestia core by Chris et al.

- Hank

Hi Hank,
That's great news, this means that we can convert the 3dS models to CMOD and many other things that were waiting on the release of 1.3.2 for every platform. One thing I did notice was that the xcode project file is less current than the Project Builder one, and now I see why. If you would like me to convert thsi file to XCode 1.5, I can do this. I guess I can even build the project in XCode from this file for the binary if you think it would help. Would it make a differrence?

Oh also, in this thread, I figured out how to get the system to pass cel URL's to Celestia but not how to get Celestia to parse the files. I don't know if this is easy or hard, but I thought I would mention if it's really easy to activate.

Cheers Hank,
Joe

Joe,

Runar has been using Cel:// URLs with Celestia v1.3.1 on his Mac for quite some time. Maybe he can explain how he does it?

Hi Selden,
Cel URLs "work" in the 1.3.2 Mac version, but you have to copy and paste them in. You can't click on them from a document and have the have Celestia activate and process the URL. I solved the first part, but I still can't get Celestia to parse the URL if it is nto pasted in.

Joe