Thank you Celestia, for your existence a new Museum is up

[ANDREA]

Andrea: The Celestia Motherlode now has a dedicated education page. It can be found at:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/educational.html
I have posted my educational activities there. However, that is only the start. I and I am sure many others, would love to see some of your educational material posted on the page. Would you be willing to upload selected educational tours, scripts, written documents in Italian or English to the page? Frank

Frank, I know and appreciate your work, and your request is an honour for me.
Sure, I'll be glad to put in Motherlode some of my works.
But I have one problem: they are very "dedicated" tours, because they have been produced for use with our Museum's PC, that's a very powerful one allowing the use of very big textures at relevant framerate (Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB 800MHz RAM, 2 80GB High Speed HDs, NviDia FX 5950 256 MB Ultra Video card).
As you know I've uploaded to Motherlode one script only, "The Orrery-English", with all the needed stuff, and even if it's nothing in size respect to the other ones, it's almost 17 MB.
But even if not so big, I had no evidence of Celestia users, so I suppose noone downloaded and used it.
As I told to Bob Hegwood, I think that it's not so useful making scripts that go deep in showing surface features, if there is not the possibility to SEE these, due to poor graphic cards or poor textures.
This is not racism, obviously, for whom has not good cards, but is the reason why my scripts+addons are so big in size.
What do you think? Should I upload files up to 450 MB? Or it should be useless because noone will ever download them due to size?
I hope you'll give me your opinion.
Anyhow I'm ready to give my support to Celestia with English translated addons, as a "thank you" for all the very nice things that I (and up to now many hundred children and people, and Christmas will increase remarkably the number!) have discovered with its help.
By soon

Andrea

[maxim]

But even if not so big, I had no evidence of Celestia users, so I suppose noone downloaded and used it.

I downloaded it, but I didn't got along to run it yet.
I'm a bit concerned about multiple installs, and how they twist the registry. And I had no time to alter it in a way that it fit's into my existing installation.

Perhaps it's worth a feature request do demand for a multiple entity version of celestia.

maxim

[ANDREA]

But even if not so big, I had no evidence of Celestia users, so I suppose noone downloaded and used it.

Perhaps it's worth a feature request do demand for a multiple entity version of celestia. maxim

I agree with you maxim, this feature could help who uses Celestia for teaching, avoiding problems arising with every new installation- upgrade- addon- change.
I hope that Chris will read this posts.
By

Andrea

[selden]

Maxim and Andrea,

Unfortunately, I don't know what you mean by "multiple entity Celestia". The meanings that I can think of are already possible.

For example, on my computer I have several different copies of Celestia in several different directories. Some are completely different versions of the program, some have different sets of Addons. In some cases I have several different versions of Celestia.exe in the same directory. Each one has a separate shortcut on the desktop, so it's easy to select the right one.

[fsgregs]

Hi folks:

Andrea, it would be worth uploading at least one major script with extensive add-ons, but there are ways to deal with it. Here are some ideas:

1. My educational activites all require a lot of add-ons. To keep users from disturbing their own extras folder and their own solarsys.ssc file by dropping those add-ons into the Celestia main directories, I have created a new directory called "educational-extras". In it go all my add-ons. I have also created a new solarsys.ssc file called "educational-solarsys.ssc", along with "educational" versions of the other data files. They go in the data folder along with the default versions. To call them up and use them, I simply include a new "celestia.cfg" file with the download, that calls up all of my ssc files, and my extras folder instead of the default. Users are instructed to save a copy of their default celestia.cfg file, then download my educational activities directly into the Celestia directory. When Celestia is launched, my add-on textures and models are displayed because my celestia.cfg file now points to them.

When a user is done with the activity, he simply swaps the default celestia.cfg file that he saved, with the one I included. All of my textures and models are no longer displayed. The original ones are. In this way, a user can run your scripts with their extensive add-ons, but will not always be stuck with these high res textures.

A 2nd trick I use is to obviously put the high-res textures only in the "hires" folder and instruct the user to press [Shift+R] to display them. If his/her computer locks up, I have a lower res version of the textures in the medres folder, and pressing [R] will display them instead.

A 3rd approach I take is to consider if I really need that 80 MB texture of one of Jupiter's moons. It is one thing to use high-res with the Earth and Mars. It is another to use it for every planet or moon. Some of the default textures are not bad at all. If your script visits a particular place for only a few moments, then moves on ... I doubt that the viewer is going to notice much of a difference between the default texture of Jupiter or Europa and a higher res version.

Due to this approach, I have high-res textures of Earth and Mars and regular textures of everything else. It has kept my add-on size down to the 100 MB range. I have also created a separate "texture" add-on, that users must pre-download. It is the big one and contains the high-res planet textures (its called the general-addon-download). Because of it, my other add-ons can be small ... containing just a few textures and the main written document (or script). If you use this approach of a single master file for the main textures, all of your scripted journeys could be placed on motherlode without requiring much RAM.

Hope this helps.

Frank

[ANDREA]

Hi folks: Andrea, it would be worth uploading at least one major script with extensive add-ons, but there are ways to deal with it. Here are some ideas:
Hope this helps. Frank

Frank, you gave me a lot of ideas to think about, and I'll do.
Stay tuned.
By and thank you

Andrea

[maxim]

Maxim and Andrea,

Unfortunately, I don't know what you mean by "multiple entity Celestia". The meanings that I can think of are already possible.

For example, on my computer I have several different copies of Celestia in several different directories. Some are completely different versions of the program, some have different sets of Addons. In some cases I have several different versions of Celestia.exe in the same directory. Each one has a separate shortcut on the desktop, so it's easy to select the right one.

The registry entries are overwritten for every new install. Also the assignment to the cel/celx mime types. That's perhaps no problem if you just upgrade linearly. But installing some custom version causes additional handwork.

maxim

[selden]

I guess I understand.

I have to admit that I don't know why it bothers you that the installation script rewrites the registry entries. Before I install a new version, I always rename the directory containing the old version (e.g. to \Celestia140p4) and then install new version of Celestia into the old directory ( E:\Program Files\Celestia on my system).

Fortunately, the links use file and directory names, not file IDs, so the Celestia desktop icon, for example, always points to the newest version of the program. I drag a shortcut from the older renamed folder to the desktop, if that's what I want. If no copy of Celestia is running, clicking on a Cel:// URL runs this newest version. If another version of Celestia is running already, that same URL will communicate with the running copy, not invoke a new one.

I realize that some people (Maxim?) have tried keeping Addons on a separate disk and mounting it onto an Addon mountpoint (directory) in the Celestia extras directory. Unfortunately, it seems to me that this causes more problems than it solves. As a result, I have the various versions of Celestia and of Addons folders on the same disk drive.

[maxim]

Everything is fine if you install a new version.
But there arise problems if you install an older version or a custom version based on an older version. In this cases I would like to retain my registry and mime type settings from the actual (newer) version. This isn't possible without some handwork.

There are no problems with mounting the extras directory from a separate disk, as you can have as many parallel mountpoints, adressing the same physical content, as you like. (I think it should even be possible to use that extras partition from within a parallel installation of linux on the same computer)

maxim

[L2Cache]

To Andrea: Have you set up computer kiosks running Celestia scripts; and if so, how do they work?

[Guest]

To Andrea: Have you set up computer kiosks running Celestia scripts; and if so, how do they work?

No, we searched for computer Kiosks, in order to make the shows more interactive, mainly for the children, but they are very expensive, at least here in Italy.
So, instead of buying 1 kiosk, we preferred to buy 2 PCs and 2 linked video projectors, that allow different shows in 2 halls.
It is very appreciated, because instead staying seated for say 25 minutes, the spectators can move from one hall to the other, passing through the Museum images and objects, following the course up to the second hall (next floor), staying seated for only 12-13 minutes for each show.
The use of kiosks, moreover, gave me this doubt: the kiosk's interactivity means that only 2-3 or so people can look at the monitor, but using a video projector the number of participans can be (in our Museum) up to 50 in the big hall, and 30 in the smaller one, and moreover in this way there is always a "teacher" that explains what they are seeing, giving more informations of those shown on the screen.
Hope to have been clear, sorry for my English.
By and happy New Year to all Celestians!

Andrea

[L2Cache]

Thanks. That makes sense.
We have been able to set up a demo kiosk using cheap computers and browser programs such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla. I just have not figured it out for a Celestia script yet. Here is some information:
http://www.cclug.org/wiki/Main/KioskMode

I have been able to get this far with a Celestia kiosk: Using Window Maker in Linux, I can start a computer with Celestia running a script in full screen mode; but the .cel script stops running at the end of the script. It would need an automatic restart or interactive viewer restart of that script or other scripts at the end to make it useful.

A search in this forum suggests I can imbed a .cel script in a .celx script to put it into a continuous loop. I'll look into this.

This .celx code from another post works and does the continuous loop trick:

Code: Select all

while true do
  celscript = celestia:createcelscript( [[
   ... CEL-script ...
  ]] )
  while celscript:tick() do
      wait(0)
    end
  end