RELEASE: The Flight of Buran

[fsgregs]

Chris:

Wow, thanks for the link. I was aware of the Wikibook but had not been utilizing it much.

The evolution of the ssc file has certainly become advanced. It will take me a looong time to digest it all ... but ...

Thanks again.

As an aside, since 1.5.0 is now finished, I am of course willing to update the User Guide document. Regarding that,

(1) Do you want me to do that for the community, or would you prefer that the Celestia Wikibook become the official user Guide for all of Celestia?

(2) If offering a separate user guide document is still valuable, I will need a good summary of all new features and keystroke controls in 1.5.0 that need to be outlined for a user in the guide. Do you have such an outline available for me?

Thanks

Frank

[selden]

Frank,

I think it would be very appropriate for you to incorporate a version of your User's Guide into the Celestia WikiBook if you want to do that.

However, there are several issues, which may or may not be problems.

One is that the WikiBook is written in "wiki markup language" which is not at all like Word. Cutting and pasting blocks of text into it works weil, but you have much less control over the font and layout.

Another is that you will have to make it clear that you are the author of the original document and are authorizing its inclusion under the GNU Free Documentation License, The people who run the site have tools which quickly locate any other Web documents with the same content.

[fsgregs]

Selden:

Thanks for the reply. I have examined the Wikibook, and although it has excellent navigation, it can be quite confusing. Headings cover a lot of territory, from how-tos, to detailed discussions of writing ssc files, scripting, lua, and so on. Also, explanations in it are written by a variety of contributors. Some are advanced users who are comfortable with a more technically savvy audience, and who may not recognize that a great many users of Celestia are novices and have no clue what a nebula is, let alone what "FOV" means. Without some education in Astronomy, even a simple concept like Absolute Magnitude can be a foreign concept to many Celestia users trying to learn how to operate the program.

As such, I originally wrote the User's Guide from the perspective that the reader had little knowledge of Astronomy and needed some hand-holding to both operate Celestia, and understand what they were seeing. The current guide for 1.4.1 is 48 pages long, includes lots of images, tons of hyperlinks, etc.

It has been a good success, and has been referred to as "excellent documentation" by outside program reviewers. As a result, while I can understand the value of an online resource such as Wikibooks, I would argue that its combination of writing styles, in-depth articles, branching instructions, and incomplete documentation can be a bit overwelming for many Celestia users who are in need of a simple, step-by-step Users Guide to each Celestia control/feature, with photos and graphics.

Consequently, I am not keen to take the entire User's Guide and convert it to Wikibooks. It would take me a very long time to cut and paste, organize, include all those graphics and cel:urls, etc., and have a visitor to Wiki be able to locate all they need to know to understand every control and feature. Naturally, I can do this over time, but I feel my time would be better spent updating the existing Guide.

Is there any summary of new keystroke controls and new features in 1.5.0 that a user would have to be taught about?

Please let me know.

Regards

Frank

[selden]

Frank,

Anyone with time and knowledge can improve the WikiBook. If you don't like it, you can fix it.

There aren't very many new keyboard commands, but I don't think anyone has recorded them in one place.

[rthorvald]

Consequently, I am not keen to take the entire User's Guide and convert it to Wikibooks. It would take me a very long time to cut and paste, organize, include all those graphics and cel:urls, etc.

Frank,
I know Word is the program of choice for you, but you might still consider using a wiki flavour; there are many variants, and i am sure you will find one that works well for the manual.

Using for example the DokuWiki (http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki), you can set it up with complete control by only you, and grant usage or write permissions for anybody, nobody or spesific persons.

The beauty of such a system is that it is GPL, the format is universally readable (since data is stored in plaintext files) and thus exchangeable by anyone with a text editor. You can edit the pages with your browser, a simple text editor, probably even Word if you experiment a little.

Also, it does not require a database, so you could run a master directly on your local machine and then publish a copy to an online server whenever you need to. You do not need to publish to a shared system, it is simple to set up your own dedicated one on any webserver. If you are interested, i can help out with that.

Also, if you haven??t got webspace for it, i would think the Motherlode team would be Ok with hosting it there.

- rthorvald

[selden]

Frank,

FWIW, the official list of changes in V1.5.0 is at
http://celestia.svn.sourceforge.net/vie ... g?view=log

[chris]

Selden:

Thanks for the reply. I have examined the Wikibook, and although it has excellent navigation, it can be quite confusing. Headings cover a lot of territory, from how-tos, to detailed discussions of writing ssc files, scripting, lua, and so on. Also, explanations in it are written by a variety of contributors. Some are advanced users who are comfortable with a more technically savvy audience, and who may not recognize that a great many users of Celestia are novices and have no clue what a nebula is, let alone what "FOV" means. Without some education in Astronomy, even a simple concept like Absolute Magnitude can be a foreign concept to many Celestia users trying to learn how to operate the program.

As such, I originally wrote the User's Guide from the perspective that the reader had little knowledge of Astronomy and needed some hand-holding to both operate Celestia, and understand what they were seeing. The current guide for 1.4.1 is 48 pages long, includes lots of images, tons of hyperlinks, etc.

It has been a good success, and has been referred to as "excellent documentation" by outside program reviewers. As a result, while I can understand the value of an online resource such as Wikibooks, I would argue that its combination of writing styles, in-depth articles, branching instructions, and incomplete documentation can be a bit overwelming for many Celestia users who are in need of a simple, step-by-step Users Guide to each Celestia control/feature, with photos and graphics.

It's true: there's a mix of styles on the Wiki, and I've adopted a more technical style for most of my contributions. That's a deliberate choice. My intended audience is not someone new to astronomy, but the more sophisticated user who needs to know exactly how a particular SSC construct or script command works.

A user's guide directed at novices is very important, too. Should you change your mind and decide to Wikify it, I'd certainly recommend giving it a separate section on the Wikibook, so that new users wouldn't be confused with some of the more technical descriptions elsewhere (though some links for people seeking more in-depth information would be useful.)

Is there any summary of new keystroke controls and new features in 1.5.0 that a user would have to be taught about?

The only new keystrokes are Shift+K and Shift+L, which slow and speed time by a factor of 2 (instead of 10x for k and l). Here's a summary of the new features in 1.5.0:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/150-fe ... mmary.html

--Chris

[selden]

After thinking about it for just a few minutes, it seems to me that it might actually be appropriate to create an entirely new WikiBook if you decide to go that way.

[fsgregs]

OK, I will first revise the Users Guide to reflect 1.5.0, then begin the process of transferring it to a Wikibook. That way, both an MS Word copy and an online Wikibook version will exist.

I do recommend that as Selden and Chris suggested, The "1.5.0 User's Guide" be on a whole new section of Wikibook.

More on that later.

Regards

Frank

[steffens]

rthorvald, chris,
I had the Buran Addon in the extras folder that I install the latest build from svn. I'm not sure when this first started because I when start Celestia I go to Mars but when I right click on the earth with the Buran addon active, my system locks up. The pop up that appears when right clicking on a planet never quite appears. The only choice is to shut down the program. Svn KDE version 4123 . When I remove the Buran addon everything goes back to normal.

I noticed that this system lock up does not happen with older cvs builds. When I right click on earth and chose orbiting bodies-spacecraft, there are 5 Buran entries and 13 blank entries extra. I guess this may be affecting the svn 4123 version in a strange way.
cartrite

I'd like to bump this message because I've got exactly the same problem with SVN trunk.
This does only happen with the KDE version, not with the gnome version.

Anyway, both linux versions show the Buran addon in a very strange way. "Camera" view seems broken in many cases, looking at the buran from weird angles. On windows (1.5.0), everything seems correct...

steffens

[cartrite]

rthorvald, chris,
I had the Buran Addon in the extras folder that I install the latest build from svn. I'm not sure when this first started because I when start Celestia I go to Mars but when I right click on the earth with the Buran addon active, my system locks up. The pop up that appears when right clicking on a planet never quite appears. The only choice is to shut down the program. Svn KDE version 4123 . When I remove the Buran addon everything goes back to normal.

I noticed that this system lock up does not happen with older cvs builds. When I right click on earth and chose orbiting bodies-spacecraft, there are 5 Buran entries and 13 blank entries extra. I guess this may be affecting the svn 4123 version in a strange way.
cartrite

I'd like to bump this message because I've got exactly the same problem with SVN trunk.
This does only happen with the KDE version, not with the gnome version.

Anyway, both linux versions show the Buran addon in a very strange way. "Camera" view seems broken in many cases, looking at the buran from weird angles. On windows (1.5.0), everything seems correct...

steffens

I still get a slow response when I try to right click on earth, probably because there are too many spacecraft entries. I can't remember if I ever got an answer to this. I can't find one in this thread. I just stopped using it with the KDE SVN versions. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it works great with the Win32 build. At least the older SVN Win32 builds.
cartrite