Celestia Forums

Hi everybody,


I've just discovered Celestia & as long as my tests go I find it a good tool for the development of my sci-fi universe Hoshikaze 2250.

I intend to use some planetary generators to make custom stellar systems, that's a kid's play in Celestia, I've already found how ^-^

Got just a few questions relative to how I could adapt it to my hyperspace sructure. It's based on natural jumppoints, invisible but massive objects, that you may think of as non-matter gravity wells. They orbit around stars & are linked by pairs, as being the sides of wormholes. A starship activates on a side & the matter in a sphere around the ship is just exchanged w/ the other side, providing ftl transport on fixed routes. So I would like to add invisible objects w/ an orbit : that's my problem... Even more complex would be to allow floating, starless jumppoint that might be gravity-grouped to form invisible kinds of hubs.

A next step would be to allow the user to issue a hyperjump command when near to a jumppoint, to instantly go to the other side of the jumppoint. But that would need custom code around Celestia. So it would not be until I've experimented a little & thought out what I exactly want & how to integrate it smartly.

So if anyone has an idea around these subjects ...



Thanks in advance & good starsighting !


Beno?t 'Mutos' ROBIN
mailto://mutos@hoshikaze.net
http://hoshikaze.net

very best site!!!
bruno

To make an "invisible" object, you could use a black sphere and set the radius to a very low number in an ssc file. To simulate the effect of a strong gravity well, you will need to download the working gravity effects from one of the forums, and set the mass to some ridiculously high number - this will certainly generate faster than light travel as the observer approaches the centre of the jump point. As for directing the motion of the observer so that they don't just fly off into any old region of space, I'm afraid I haven't a clue. Assuming you could somehow alter the Celestia code to do this in some fashion (my guess would be to have the program orientate the observer automatically when approaching the jump point so that it is lined up with the paired point.... or, MUCH better idea, write a .cel file that goes to the first jump point, waits for a given number of seconds (so that the observer accelerates towards the jump point), then goes to the second jump point, and sets velocity to zero. However this would either require cel files to enable/disable gravity effects, which I don't think they do at the moment (I might be wrong). If so then then you would have to be transported to a considerable distance from the second jump-point to avoid falling back into it, but it SHOULD work. Unfortunately, you'd have to write two cel files for each pair of points, one going to one jump point first, the other to the other one first. Hmmm.... I think I was typing in brackets earlier.... but I can't remember why. Thinking aloud here.... hope this helps in some fashion.


(Mad Boris)

Hi everybody,


Thanks Bruno for ur appreciation ! Always good to see work appreciated ^-^ Anyway, site isn't near complete, still needs many hours work to satisfy me !

Thanks Mad Boris for ur suggestions. I'm currently experimenting & ur answer confirms what I thought. I already used a script w/ very short time (0.01s) to go quasi instantly from 1 pt to another. Now how fire the script ? Should be fine if Celestia allowed behaviours for objects at a key press & script could accept parameters. Then we could just have each jump point fire the jump script w/ its proper dest jump point as parameter. Could also have other uses, for instance to select pre-coded views of a particular object or write generic scripts.

For now I'm bent on modelling known Hoshikaze systems, let alone the jump points. Once this step is OK, might model jump points in Mad Boris' way, let alone the gravity well, but just as dark/small orbital bodies.


Thanks again !

Beno?t