Celestia Forums

Hi, I came across a comment in the wiki for the long defunct Liverpool Software Gazette...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Software_Gazette
:
One small program, Star Gate, written in Apple II BASIC and published in the fourth edition even became the basis for a complete astronomy program known as Celestia (available from http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/).
/
I've searched the Celestia site, can't see anything about it...

Any truth to this tale ??

Curiously, 'Stargate- A 3D Planetarium' and the follow-up article in issue 6 with the 50 ly tour was how I got into computing...

Hello

This is a screenshot of stargate game for Apple II.


Make you own opinion

Er, sorry, no, that 'space invaders' clone was NOT LSG's 'Stargate- The 3D Planetarium'.

IIRC, modes included orthogonal, perspective with selectable vanishing point & 'tank'. You could have stars appear as balls on sticks to show Z-axis. Blob size could show distance-corrected brightness. You could even lay out a trail between stars.

IIRC, it could pan, tilt and zoom, albeit verrry slowly off-orthogonal. The program was both CPU- and RAM-limited, but spared a couple of REM lines for data attribution. A re-draw could take up to five (5) minutes. With 100 nearby stars plus background set loaded, a redraw could take a lot longer...

Nik wrote:Any truth to this tale ??

While Stargate sounds like a nice piece of software for its day, not a single piece of it ended up in Celestia. I wrote the first lines of Celestia code in late 2000, and had never heard of Stargate before reading your message. That Wikipedia article should be corrected.

--Chris

chris wrote:

Nik wrote:Any truth to this tale ??

While Stargate sounds like a nice piece of software for its day, not a single piece of it ended up in Celestia. I wrote the first lines of Celestia code in late 2000, and had never heard of Stargate before reading your message. That Wikipedia article should be corrected.

--Chris

How about OpenUniverse?

http://openuniverse.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openuniverse.org/


That's how I found to Celestia in 2002...

Fridger

I found celestia looking for 3D starmaps. I find something much better. Sorry it off topic.

chris wrote:

Nik wrote:Any truth to this tale ??

While Stargate sounds like a nice piece of software for its day, not a single piece of it ended up in Celestia. I wrote the first lines of Celestia code in late 2000, and had never heard of Stargate before reading your message. That Wikipedia article should be corrected.

--Chris

I've edited the Wikipedia article.

Thank you for correcting the wiki !!

I'm very glad Celestia didn't inherit any of the clumsy code I wrote for Stargate.

Now that's settled, I can have some fun roaming the nearby stars...

Nik