Celestia Forums

ElChristou sent me some experimental enhancements to Celestia's user interface.
These include a splash screen, subtle background images for Preferences, Go To, and Set Time windows, and Mac-like keyboard shortcut glyphs for many menu items.
On top of all that, there's also a nearly-full fledged French localization. Thanks for the hard work ElChristou!
While these aren't yet part of the official OS X version, they may be - please leave feedback

Additionally, this build incorporates nearly all of the features intended for 1.4.0pre7, including new galaxy rendering. Use ( and ) to adjust galaxy brightness. The coloring is based partially on t00fri's HSV method.

Download from here:

Celestia_(UNOFFICIAL_dirkpitt_build_20050724).zip

The download contains the application, and the minimum of data files needed to see the new galaxy rendering.
I didn't apply the foreground orbits patch to this build because I haven't yet figured out how to get rid of the mini orbits.

Dirk, we still have a frame around the "Go" and "Set Time" button...
Also the Current Date still have -! in the menu.

I have just discover the warnings message in the Go to and Set Time panes when one click on the button without filling the fields... Those ones also needs a translation...

Question - should I be using the 1.4pre6 package as my "base" package? I only ask b/c I've already encountered a problem... I cannot seem to see galaxies... rendering is on, Resources folder has been re-populated with the new items...

(but everything else looks GREAT! - very polished)

UPDATE: Okay... turning on labels helped me a bit. Wow - lots of galaxies. But some of the galaxies are visible, and some are not (no matter how close I get). Is that correct? What threw me off at first, however, was that the Milky Way is NOT visible - from any vantage point.

BlindedByTheLight wrote:...Question - should I be using the 1.4pre6 package as my "base" package? I only ask b/c I've already encountered a problem... I cannot seem to see galaxies... rendering is on, Resources folder has been re-populated with the new items...

Strange, all work fine for me (there is lot to say on the rendering of galaxies, but as this work still in progress let's wait later results)...

Have you try the ) and ( keys to set the intensity of galaxies?

EDIT: Steven forget the above, cross messages...

**
Question:
In one of your builds, haven't you create a shortcut for Nebulaes?

Yeah - I did try the brightness. But the story gets stranger... I simply restarted Celestia - and now they all work.

1) That's weird
2) FRICKIN' COOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!!

Nice work Fridger, Dirkpitt, and ElChristou (and whoever else) on the galaxies.

Two quick thoughts:

1) The Star Browser - I know it's been there... but it'd be nice if the keyboard shortcuts (goto, center) worked from within it. You can see them "highlighting" a pull down menu when, say, hitting C for center - and "trying" to work but it doesn't.

2) I think Windows has this feature already - but it would be really cool to be able to restrict showing stars (and now galaxies!) to a certain distance. When rotating around an object - with labels on (which is sometimes they only way to see galaxies so far away) there's so many, it would help visualization to just see the ones in a certain sphere.

Thanks again guys!

BlindedByTheLight wrote:...Nice work Fridger, Dirkpitt, and ElChristou (and whoever else) on the galaxies...

I must correct I haven't work on the galaxies, all credits goes to Toti, Fridger and Chris (and others?)...

It's true that it's a bit hard to select a remote galaxy with the mouse...

ElChristou wrote:Dirk, we still have a frame around the "Go" and "Set Time" button...
Also the Current Date still have -! in the menu.

I have just discover the warnings message in the Go to and Set Time panes when one click on the button without filling the fields... Those ones also needs a translation...

I think the only way to really fix the background-erasing-around-the-default-button issue
is to well, just get rid of the buttons This actually makes a lot of sense - hitting the enter
key performs the "go" or "set time" function right now anyway, and the esc key cancels.

The "-!" is still there unfortunately, because '!' appears to be another character that can't
be used as a keyboard shortcut glyph (at least, it is invisible on my system).

BlindedByTheLight wrote:1) The Star Browser - I know it's been there... but it'd be nice if the keyboard shortcuts (goto, center) worked from within it. You can see them "highlighting" a pull down menu when, say, hitting C for center - and "trying" to work but it doesn't.

2) I think Windows has this feature already - but it would be really cool to be able to restrict showing stars (and now galaxies!) to a certain distance

I'll have to try out the Windows version again today because I'm not sure what you
mean by (2). Do you mean "Limit stars visible by magnitude"?

I'm not sure how to do (1) without sacrificing the ability to select items in the Browser by
typing the first few characters of their names.

DELETED

dirkpitt wrote:The "-!" is still there unfortunately, because '!' appears to be another character that can't
be used as a keyboard shortcut glyph (at least, it is invisible on my system).

Dirk---I was able to get a ! to appear for me in Xcode per the method, I believe you showed me... will that not suffice?[/quote]

BlindedByTheLight wrote:Yeah - I did try the brightness. But the story gets stranger... I simply restarted Celestia - and now they all work.

1) That's weird
2) FRICKIN' COOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!!

Nice work Fridger, Dirkpitt, and ElChristou (and whoever else) on the galaxies.

Two quick thoughts:

1) The Star Browser - I know it's been there... but it'd be nice if the keyboard shortcuts (goto, center) worked from within it. You can see them "highlighting" a pull down menu when, say, hitting C for center - and "trying" to work but it doesn't.

2) I think Windows has this feature already - but it would be really cool to be able to restrict showing stars (and now galaxies!) to a certain distance. When rotating around an object - with labels on (which is sometimes they only way to see galaxies so far away) there's so many, it would help visualization to just see the ones in a certain sphere.

Thanks again guys!

Hi Blinded,

while being largely offline for several weeks, I did quite a bit of further work on galaxy brightness and coloration. Since Chris seems to be "hiding" again, I don't know what he is up to. I wrote him an email today asking for a patch of his "state of the art" in order not to vaste my time...

Chris had introduced two nasty bugs relative to what I sent him in his last CVS commit.

a) Further away galaxies were all NOT rendered (invisible), since he chose the "far distance" parameter a factor 10-100 too small for galaxies.

b) the magnitude stuff does not function properly, since he chose to replace

"absMag" (as I use it in my deepsky.dsc CVS catalog) ==>
"AbsMag" in his committed code.

Hence without changing the code or my deepsky.dsc the absolute galaxy magnitude entry in my catalog is NOT used!

In my code here on the laptop, all these things now work very nicely...

I have even added a printout of the 'apparent magnitude' in the top left corner below the galaxy name, distance and angular size.

Don't forget that each of my galaxies has an InfoURL entry such that you may click with the right mouse button into the Strasbourg data center and get a DSS photographic image of the respective galaxy and its environment IMMEDIATELY in your browser!

So you may compare all the orientations that I computed. I have checked hundreds myself, meanwhile

Bye Fridger

dirkpitt wrote:...I think the only way to really fix the background-erasing-around-the-default-button issue is to well, just get rid of the buttons This actually makes a lot of sense - hitting the enter key performs the "go" or "set time" function right now anyway, and the esc key cancels.

Then we should forget backgrounds for those panes, like this is not... acceptable...

The "-!" is still there unfortunately, because '!' appears to be another character that can't be used as a keyboard shortcut glyph (at least, it is invisible on my system).

Have you tried a copy/paste?

dirkpitt wrote:I'll have to try out the Windows version again today because I'm not sure what you
mean by (2). Do you mean "Limit stars visible by magnitude"?

I'm not sure how to do (1) without sacrificing the ability to select items in the Browser by
typing the first few characters of their names.

Ah... good point about (1)... but I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. To clarify - I am referring to the Command-B Star Browser/Celestia Browser - only recently added to the Mac OS version. The one that has options for TRACK & CENTER & GOTO, etc. in it. As far as I can tell, that does not at all allow the ability to select items by typing the first few characters. Are we talking about the same thing?

As for 2) I actually meant something that I read in the user's guide under Filter Stars:

This slider determines how many stars Celestia will draw at one time. It regulates star number by how far away a star is from your viewpoint. By default, it is set at 1,000,000 light years. Since the diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way) is about 100,000 LY across, Celestia will draw all stars in its data base at this slider setting. However, you can lower the slider and command Celestia to draw only closer stars. For example, if you set the slider to 100, the program will only draw stars that are within 100 light years of Earth. Since this requires far less computing power than the highest slider value, this may be useful if the program is running slowly for you. Lowering the slider will speed things up. Also, you may have a scientific need to only see the closest stars to your viewpoint.

I do not believe the Mac OS version has this functionaliy. Would be great, not only for stars, but galaxies also.

t00fri wrote:a) Further away galaxies were all NOT rendered (invisible), since he chose the "far distance" parameter a factor 10-100 too small for galaxies.

Hopefully that will get sorted out. I would LOVE to be able to see a sky full of galaxies.

And the InfoURL feature is awesome! Thaks again.

BlindedByTheLight wrote:...As for 2) I actually meant something that I read in the user's guide under Filter Stars:

This slider determines how many stars Celestia will draw at one time. It regulates star number by how far away a star is from your viewpoint. By default, it is set at 1,000,000 light years. Since the diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way) is about 100,000 LY across, Celestia will draw all stars in its data base at this slider setting. However, you can lower the slider and command Celestia to draw only closer stars. For example, if you set the slider to 100, the program will only draw stars that are within 100 light years of Earth. Since this requires far less computing power than the highest slider value, this may be useful if the program is running slowly for you. Lowering the slider will speed things up. Also, you may have a scientific need to only see the closest stars to your viewpoint.

I do not believe the Mac OS version has this functionaliy. Would be great, not only for stars, but galaxies also.

uh hemm... Steven you should play a bit with the star slider in the control panel... but yes, if the galaxy catalogue become very big, it would be cool to have the same setting for galaxies...

ElChristou wrote:

BlindedByTheLight wrote:...As for 2) I actually meant something that I read in the user's guide under Filter Stars:

This slider determines how many stars Celestia will draw at one time. It regulates star number by how far away a star is from your viewpoint. By default, it is set at 1,000,000 light years. Since the diameter of our galaxy (the Milky Way) is about 100,000 LY across, Celestia will draw all stars in its data base at this slider setting. However, you can lower the slider and command Celestia to draw only closer stars. For example, if you set the slider to 100, the program will only draw stars that are within 100 light years of Earth. Since this requires far less computing power than the highest slider value, this may be useful if the program is running slowly for you. Lowering the slider will speed things up. Also, you may have a scientific need to only see the closest stars to your viewpoint.

I do not believe the Mac OS version has this functionaliy. Would be great, not only for stars, but galaxies also.

uh hemm... Steven you should play a bit with the star slider in the control panel... but yes, if the galaxy catalogue become very big, it would be cool to have the same setting for galaxies...

I have... I guess, yeah, in some, I misread the capabilities and thought one wasn't only confined to limited stars from their POV. I was under the impression - per this line:

<<For example, if you set the slider to 100, the program will only draw stars that are within 100 light years of Earth.>>

I thought I could confine Celestia to draw only the stars 100 light years from earth - regardless of my vantage point then fly out and observe this "bubble" of stars.

Similiar to what happens if you set the Constellation Boundaries to on and pull back very far.

I had hoped I could get a bird's eye view of how many stars are 10 light years from earth, then 50 light years... then see how the number grows when 100 light years from earth - and so on. I love how Celestia allows use to get a "sense" of scale - and that feature would have, I think, helped. Perhaps I shall post a "Confine This Limit To Sol" under the "Faintest Star" Preference in a feature request thread...

As for galaxies... same thing. I would love to be able to pull back a large distance and an ever-expanding bubble (depending on my slider choice) of how many galaxies are at a certain distance from earth. Especially when rotating around, it REALLY gives a good sense of things...

t00fri wrote:Chris had introduced two nasty bugs relative to what I sent him in his last CVS commit.

a) Further away galaxies were all NOT rendered (invisible), since he chose the "far distance" parameter a factor 10-100 too small for galaxies.

b) the magnitude stuff does not function properly, since he chose to replace

"absMag" (as I use it in my deepsky.dsc CVS catalog) ==>
"AbsMag" in his committed code.

Hence without changing the code or my deepsky.dsc the absolute galaxy magnitude entry in my catalog is NOT used!

I think Chris fixed problem (a): http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=7785423&forum_id=38991

I'll have to check (b) on my next coffee break.

ElChristou wrote:

dirkpitt wrote:...I think the only way to really fix the background-erasing-around-the-default-button issue is to well, just get rid of the buttons This actually makes a lot of sense - hitting the enter key performs the "go" or "set time" function right now anyway, and the esc key cancels.

Then we should forget backgrounds for those panes, like this is not... acceptable...

The "-!" is still there unfortunately, because '!' appears to be another character that can't be used as a keyboard shortcut glyph (at least, it is invisible on my system).

Have you tried a copy/paste?

I can see the ! in Interface Builder (IB), but when I actually run Celestia the ! disappears.
I even tried setting the shortcut to "Shift-1" (which is !) but IB won't even let me do that.

I'll remove the backgrounds for the Set Time and Go To windows.

I can see the ! in Interface Builder (IB), but when I actually run Celestia the ! disappears.
I even tried setting the shortcut to "Shift-1" (which is !) but IB won't even let me do that.

I shoulda figured you had checked IB out but just being thorough. One other thought... it looks like you're just adding the "!" after the name as a text field since it won't stick in IB?

Maybe, as a band-aide fix, just add a whole bunch of spaces after the menu name so the "!" lines up better with the other... glyphs are they called?

Also - you had noted you left out doctorjoe's foreground patch b/c of a bug? Did you also leave out his GO TO spaceship start-time patch? That no longer seems to be there, either...

Thanks,
Steven