Opinions: dwarf planets and minor moons

[chris]

What is the default class for objects in orbit around dwarf planets: moon or minormoon?

The default class for such objects is moon, not minormoon. I think that this is appropriate. What's perhaps not appropriate is that the default class for an object orbiting an asteroid is also moon.

--Chris

[chris]

Chris,
I just built r4275. And no for others out there, I did not update my site yet.
I made the following change to minormoons.ssc from the extras folder.

Code: Select all

"Metis" "Sol/Jupiter"
{
   Class "MinorMoon"
   Texture       "asteroid.jpg"
   SemiAxes [ 30 20 20 ]

   EllipticalOrbit
   {
   Period      0.294780
   SemiMajorAxis   127979
   Eccentricity   0.0012
   Inclination   0.019
   AscendingNode   263.953   #
   ArgOfPericenter 274.588   # J2000.0
   MeanAnomaly   7.649   #
   }



When I toggle M nothing seemed to happen until I went to Metis. I toggled m and lit up all the moon labels. Then when I toggled M, the Metis label disappeared and reappeared. But if I togged m to turn the labels off on all moons, toggling M had no affect.
Is this how it is supposed to work?
cartrite

This seems strange and isn't what I observe with the Qt4 version (can't try the Win32 version right now because I'm on my Mac.) The moons and minormoons toggle are completely independent of each other. An argument could I suppose be made for making the m key toggle all moons, both major and minor, but that's not what I implemented.

--Chris

[cartrite]

I just built the Win/QT4 version of r4276 that includes Vincent's update and I also modified miormoons.ssc to include the line

Code: Select all

   Class "minormoon"

on all the moons in that file. It acts the same way as the Win32 r4275. The moon labels have to be enabled for the minormoon labels to work. They do show up in the browser under minormoons though.
Some screenshots.

minormoons1.jpg

minormoon2.jpg

minormoon3.jpg

Edit: Maybe this has something to do with windows not recognizing upper cas lower case everywhere in the code?
cartrite

[Vincent]

Thanks, Vincent. I've checked in the core changes, the keyboard bindings, and the Qt4 solar system browser changes. So go ahead and commit the UI changes whenever you're ready.

I've commited the Qt4 UI changes.
As for the Windows UI, I'd like to take advantage of the changes to do a bit of reorganization: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12334

[cartrite]

I tried to build the r4276 KDE version and Linux/QT4 version. The Linux QT4 version doesn't work right at all. When I only check on Minor Moons labels nothing happens. When I have Moons labels enabled all labels are rendered. When I uncheck Minor Moons with Moons enabled the minormoons only dim slightly.
This also happens when I toggle m and M.
KDE does nothing at all.
cartrite

[Vincent]

I just built the Win/QT4 version of r4276 that includes Vincent's update and I also modified miormoons.ssc to include the line

Code: Select all

   Class "minormoon"

on all the moons in that file. It acts the same way as the Win32 r4275. The moon labels have to be enabled for the minormoon labels to work. They do show up in the browser under minormoons though.
Some screenshots.

Steve,

Everything is OK on my system when I add the minormoon class to Metis, both with the Windows and Qt4 versions.

[chris]

I just built the Win/QT4 version of r4276 that includes Vincent's update and I also modified miormoons.ssc to include the line

Code: Select all

   Class "minormoon"

on all the moons in that file. It acts the same way as the Win32 r4275. The moon labels have to be enabled for the minormoon labels to work. They do show up in the browser under minormoons though.
Some screenshots.

Steve,

Everything is OK on my system when I add the minormoon class to Metis, both with the Windows and Qt4 versions.

Same here: everything is working fine with the new classes. Maybe try a clean rebuild?

--Chris

[cartrite]

Try it when spacecraft labels are disabled. With Linux QT4, when the spacecraft labels are enabled, minormoons can be toggled on and off as you guys suggest. But when you disable spacecraft labels the minormoon labels also disappear.
PS I always build clean. From a brand new svn folder thats unaltered in any way.
cartrite

[cartrite]

Actually, it works as you guys describe as long as at least one other label is enabled. If all other labels are disabled, minormoon labels will not work on their own in the Win32 build which is what I just tried. I suspect the other versions behave the same but didn't try all the different versions yet.
cartrite

[Vincent]

I can finally confirm the problem Steve has reported: minor moon labels are displayed only if at least one other label check box of the body class is enabled. This issue can be fixed by adding MinorMoonLabels (and DwarfPlanetLabel) to the BodyLabelMask list in render.h:

Code: Select all

BodyLabelMask       = (PlanetLabels | DwarfPlanetLabels | MoonLabels | MinorMoonLabels | AsteroidLabels | SpacecraftLabels | CometLabels),

[cartrite]

I can confirm that Vincent's fix works for the Win32 build. I'll wait for the svn commit to rebuild before I update my website with the new executable.
cartrite

[chris]

I can confirm that Vincent's fix works for the Win32 build. I'll wait for the svn commit to rebuild before I update my website with the new executable.
cartrite

Great! Vincent, check in the fix when you're ready. I'd been unable to reproduce the problem because even after I'd disabled spacecraft labels, I'd left planet labels on.

--Chris

[Danial]

Seeing as there is no classification for "minor moon", why not just let the user decide by putting a "Number of Moons to display"-type slider into the options dialogue? The moons would need to be internally listed by size but then anything over the user-selected number would be put into the "minor moons" category.

[cartrite]

I can finally confirm the problem Steve has reported: minor moon labels are displayed only if at least one other label check box of the body class is enabled. This issue can be fixed by adding MinorMoonLabels (and DwarfPlanetLabel) to the BodyLabelMask list in render.h:

Code: Select all

BodyLabelMask       = (PlanetLabels | DwarfPlanetLabels | MoonLabels | MinorMoonLabels | AsteroidLabels | SpacecraftLabels | CometLabels),

Using this patch by Vincent for render.h, I am able to confirm that it works with the Linux version of QT4. After I modified a few files from the kde directory, I am also able to confirm this works with the Linux KDE version.
cartrite

[Vincent]

The fix is in SVN now.

[cartrite]

Does the file numberedmoons.ssc contain all minormoons?
cartrite

[ElChristou]

Does the file numberedmoons.ssc contain all minormoons?
cartrite

Don't think so; the file named minormoons.ssc must define a few others... or not? (if not the name is not very appropriate... )

[duds26]

Concerning Ceres and co, it depends if it's too much work to do or not; if not IMHO I would say let's go because if I'm not wrong official publications have already change their entries. I say if it's not too much work because then reverting would be easy...

For minor moons versus moons colors, why a light declination of the moon color? just to mark the 2 groups? Don't need to be different, just a tone or two up or down... no?

For dwarf planets same thing, I would say same palette as planets, a tone or two up or down...

this is a nice representation

Pluto and Charon are just some space rocks, (there are many more that are even bigger than Pluto). Classify them please as dwarf planets.

Many people learned them as a planet and hold on to these memories too much.

And is the file Minormoons.ssc already removed from extra's and put in the folder data?

[cartrite]

I've added new object classes called minormoon and dwarf planet. Minor moon exists to reduce some of the orbit and label clutter from all the rocks orbiting the outer planets. If you set the class of a moon to minormoon, its orbit and label will not be shown unless you enable minor moon orbits and labels. The same behavior will apply for dwarf planets: their labels and orbits can be toggled independently of planets.

For label toggle keys, I think shift+m and shift+p make the most sense for minor moons and dwarf planets. Sensible?

Some other questions:

- Should the label/orbit colors be the same for moons as minor moons; my sense is that they should be the same colors.
- Same question for dwarf planets: identical label/orbit colors as for planets?
- I'm not that enthusiastic about actually changing the classes of Ceres, Pluto, and Eris to dwarf planet. It's not that I have strong opinions either way on the IAU decision; I just don't want to mess with the classes if the resolution of 2006 gets overturned in 2006. Does anyone actually care about this whole dwarf planet thing? (Careful: I'm asking about this in the context of Celestia, not trying to stir up the whole is-Pluto-a-planet debate. Impassioned statements about the planethood of any solar system body will be deleted from this thread.)

--Chris

Chris, are you aware that there will be backward compatibility issues with these new classes and 1.5.0 as they stand now? I'm not sure what is going on here but I found this out when I ran 1.5.0 with a modified minormoons.ssc file that included the Class minormoons for all the entries in that file.
See here.
viewtopic.php?p=102805#p102805
cartrite

[chris]

Chris, are you aware that there will be backward compatibility issues with these new classes and 1.5.0 as they stand now? I'm not sure what is going on here but I found this out when I ran 1.5.0 with a modified minormoons.ssc file that included the Class minormoons for all the entries in that file.
See here.
viewtopic.php?p=102805#p102805
cartrite

Yes, I am. In fact, these aren't going to be the only compatibility changes. After the minormoon class is added, I'm going to modify the definitions of many moons and planets to use the IAU rotation models. Since 1.5.1 and earlier versions of Celestia don't recognize CustomRotation, using the latest SVN version of solarsys.ssc with a non-SVN Celestia executable will result in incorrectly oriented objects.

--Chris