REQUEST: Drawing star maps on the fly

[aaron38]

I am using Celestia to draw fictional maps of trade routes between stars. Right now I'm simply hijacking the Asterisms file to draw my maps instead of the Constellations. This works fine, and it's amazing to be able to fly around and through the maps in 3D. But it's incredibly tedious to plot a course, close Celestia, edit the file and then restart Celestia. Plus the lines are only in one color so a large map becomes a jumbled mess.

What I would love to do is create these maps on the fly inside Celestia. The interface could be very simple. Enter Star A, Star B, Star C etc, line color, route name and hit Enter. One color and label per "constellation" is fine. A window to display the entire list, make edits and toggle routes on/off, and that's it.

Is something like that possible, or is the Celestia code such that the Asterisms file or equivalent simply can't be edited on the fly?

Thanks!

[selden]

Unfortunately, Celestia does not have the ability for you to add lines in 3D space in realtime. There has been some discussion of that being a possibility in a future version, but I suspect it won't happen soon

A crude alternative would be to do it using 3D modeling software. You'd have to have a model to represent the star positions, then you could add individual lines between them. I call it crude, because you'd be using the software's "preview" function to do the realtime rotations, which would display the modeling software's coordinate axes, etc. which might or might not have any relationship to astronomical coordinate systems.

[aaron38]

That's what I figured, thanks for checking. If something like this could be added in the future, it would be an amazing feature to have. Until then I'll just stick with the Asterisms file, it gets the job done. Thanks again.

[W0RLDBUILDER]

Or do what you've been doing and just name the paths after their respective controlling entities.

[Reiko]

What about a script of some kind that could let you draw a line between stars then save it as a cmod? I don't have a clue what is and isn't possible with scripts so that might be a dumb question.

[ajtribick]

At one point I had a script that would draw the Delaunay triangulation for various sets of stars, not sure where it is at the moment.

Some screenshots of it, buried in the "Post your pictures" thread

EDIT: found the code, but it is very messy and needs cleaning up. Not sure how much it is worth doing this, you will need to be able to run Perl scripts and the qhull application to be able to run this.

[Fenerit]

At one point I had a script that would draw the Delaunay triangulation for various sets of stars, not sure where it is at the moment.

Some screenshots of it, buried in the "Post your pictures" thread

EDIT: found the code, but it is very messy and needs cleaning up. Not sure how much it is worth doing this, you will need to be able to run Perl scripts and the qhull application to be able to run this.

BTW, I'm very interested in that code...

[ajtribick]

Ok here's the code (sorry about the delay). I got rid of one of the more obvious bugs, but please take a look at the README file and the code before you do anything with it. As it stands, it cannot handle the unit syntax for Celestia 1.7, but I somehow don't see 1.7 being released any time soon. Also included is a .dsc/.cmod file that can be used immediately to see how this looks.

[Fenerit]

Thanks a lot! Hope do not have wasted you time beyond the necessary.

[Reiko]

Hello aaron38,

I have perhaps a answer for you.
I realized few months ago a "trade route" between some stars.
You save the file asterism.dat under data and you create new file
with notepad (for example) with the same name.
The file is easy to read it and to update it.

I hope that it's helping you.
Bye.

That's what he's been doing according to his first post.