Celestia Forums

I hate to say this, but I think that Celestia is getting to the point where it should have an auto update option. I am not talking about the engine it self, but rather all the improvement made to the textures and new models. While I do support Bruckner's homepage http://bruckner.homelinux.net/index.html I have noticed that a lot of people are not sending their data to him, or he has not been updating site. With an Auto Updater you can simply connect to a server and download the latest versions of everything, and I mean everything either all I one shot or by its component parts. There are some problems that need to be overcome before this will work, but I know that for all you die hard fans out there, you would rather be spending time exploring the richness of Celestia then trying to figure out if you have the latest images and data for it.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents

Thanks for taking the time to read this,
-Matt-

Anonymous wrote:I hate to say this, but I think that Celestia is getting to the point where it should have an auto update option. I am not talking about the engine it self, but rather all the improvement made to the textures and new models. While I do support Bruckner's homepage http://bruckner.homelinux.net/index.html I have noticed that a lot of people are not sending their data to him, or he has not been updating site. With an Auto Updater you can simply connect to a server and download the latest versions of everything, and I mean everything either all I one shot or by its component parts. There are some problems that need to be overcome before this will work, but I know that for all you die hard fans out there, you would rather be spending time exploring the richness of Celestia then trying to figure out if you have the latest images and data for it.

Anyway that?s my 2 cents

Thanks for taking the time to read this,
-Matt-

I am not aware of AutoUpdating features e.g. in Linux. You are not by chance forgetting that Celestia is developped as multi OS software?

Of course, you may always download by ftp whatever is in a given directory, but this is not very different from Bruckner's site.

I also consider it important that people are able to read a description of what they are about to download. This works fine on Bruckner's site, perhaps also in some Windows updaters but not so easily in normal ftp downloads.
Somebody has always to update README's ...

Did you make once an estimate of the tremendous 'sucking load' arising if all of us would put our O(200 MB) hires textures onto one server and people would start with 'mass-downloading'? Do you have a sufficiently powerful server that you may offer? This would be great.

Bye Fridger

Hi Matt,

you're right in my point of view. The probs to get a decent (equals current) Celestia running have been multiplied with the arrive of new developers and folks willing to take part. That is a natural process. Just take a look at Mozilla's history.

But I disagree with you about any auto-update feature. That is simply too much asked of a free multiplatform software.

I'd suggest to have this:

#1. One central place to download everything you need.
#2. Seperate engine downlad.
#3. Current, but consistent extension/update packs. (That is eg. new/better textures with according data, 3D models etc.)

I'm thinking of a Celestia standard edition which is published the way Celestia currently is. Then you'd find suitable extension packs for the hi-quality grfx cards, the scientific astronomer, the sci-fi guy and so on.

That'd still be a lot of work which must be invested into software distribution, not direct development. So don't expect to see this very soon.

But it'll gonna happen. Sooner or later
Axel

It wouldn't be terribly hard to do this using sourceforge for hosting.. I mean, that's what sf is for after all :)

Writing the network code is going to be the biggest pain in the ass.. doing it in ObjC isn't a big deal, but this probably shouldn't be an OS X only feature.. So maybe adding a dependency of libcurl or something would be in order?

Autoupdate would be a useful feature, especially for things like satellite and asteroid orbital elements, which are frequently updated.

I've got XML support working on Windows and almost working in Linux. The free libxml package that I'm using also includes a mini-http client which could work for autoupdating over the web. Unfortunately, I've been diverted from Celestia work by all sorts of other things lately, so 1.2.5 will still not have XML support and an autoupdate feature will have to wait a bit.

I'm not sure about using SourceForge though . . . would they be happy about having their bandwidth used for this?

--Chris

chris wrote:I'm not sure about using SourceForge though . . . would they be happy about having their bandwidth used for this?

I'm pretty sure they don't mind. Xplanet features clouds update over the web (the clouds file is automatically composed from several satellite data every 4 hours) from sourceforge. Filesize is ~400KB so this feature eats a lot more bandwidth than XML orbital data would and sourceforge didn't complain (it's been working for a few months).

http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/

http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/clouds_2000.jpg