New Celestia Mod: Choir of Angels

[russell]

Hi guys, I turned Celestia into a game where you fly around and listen to mp3s. Go check it out already!

http://www.mindspring.com/~russell_d_cagle/choir.html

[Incognito]

This is great but I miss all the controls and menus of Celestia. Maybe Chris will consider adding sound support in the future. Or at least add some remote controls for winamp as a temp solution

I think the ultimate would be to be able to play multiple streams such as a soundtrack while playing voice overs or sound effects

[Russell]

This is great but I miss all the controls and menus of Celestia. Maybe Chris will consider adding sound support in the future. Or at least add some remote controls for winamp as a temp solution

I think the ultimate would be to be able to play multiple streams such as a soundtrack while playing voice overs or sound effects

I wanted it to be self-contained, and I thought that fiddling with a bunch of options would take away from it. The whole point was to hear your music collection all at once in a dynamic environment. I like hearing a bunch of songs at once, and I like distorting them, so it's more like a perverted jukebox with stars.

[anarion9]

I found fantastic navigate through the stars with music! It's a pity that the commands to select and move to specific objects don't work... or not?!?
It's planned to include in the full Celestia something similar?
regards
Anarion

[Vicware]

I'm know Chris(et al) has his hands full just accomplishing what he's done
up to now. Besides bugs, projects like adding more user-friendliness
and, technically and visually perfecting, and further documenting this
fabulous software is a fair job in itself.

If Chris(et al) spends too much time getting all kinds of messages
on this forum about alternate, twisted universes and MP3 playback, he'll have little time to do all the obvious work still needed to make a solid, basic Celestia. And maybe make him crazy. If you want to listen to music while you Celestize through the galaxy, then turn your stereo on and
rock & roll (or mozart) as I sometimes do. Also, though cpus are getting
pretty fast, a cpu intensive program like this doesn't need to use up
valuble clock cycles, when it's not really the point of the software (I
don't think?)

All this in in complete friendship and mutual admiration of Celestia -
I'm not making any presumptions, I'm thinking all those old software
writers out there might support my general point.

Vic

[Incognito]

My point about putting the ability to play music or sound files from within Celestia is not just so I can groove to tunes while surfing around the solar system. I believe that it would be a valuable addition to a great educational tool. Imagine you are a science teacher or you make presentations at astronomy clubs. You could make some really cool presentations set to music and have prerecorded voice overs to illustrate your points. These would all be able to be coded in your .cel file so you could control when the sounds occurred. Also Chris expressed an interest that others might take up the Celestia engine for game developement. Any gaming features that he adds will only make it more attractive for a developer and more likely that others will contribute something to Celestia

I do take your point Vic that Chris does a lot of work already to make this free product (thanks Chris!) and the last thing I want to do is sound demanding. If Chris dropped developement of this tomorrow I would still thank him and Celestia would still reside on my hard drive for a long time to come. If I was to give a priority to sound being added it would definately be behind bug fixes and improvements in accuracy and detail of the model

Anyway don't be too hard on those with way out ideas. I just proves people are excited about Celestia and that is a good thing! Besides Chris has done a great job so far and I think he will continue to make good decisions about the future direction of his baby

[chris]

I downloaded Russell's mp3-playing mod for Celestia, and I loved it . . . I think it's an extremely creative use of Celestia. It's great fun to turn the lights off and drift through space listening to music fade in and out as you pass by different stars--there's a lot of weird music on my hard drive, and I feel like I'm traveling through interstellar space permeated by alien broadcasts.

Incognito mades a good point about the use of sound--the ability to play them back voice samples from .cel files would make it possible to write some great tutorials and presentations. I'll be adding this feature soon. Once Celestia is audio capable, I suppose it's a simple matter to add MP3 background music playback . . . but, if you want to play MP3s, isn't it easier just to fire up winamp, choose some songs, then flip back to Celestia?

--Chris

[Vicware]

Absolutely it will be wonderful to have sound support for education,
tutorials, etc. Actually it reminds me of those sound systems in museums
that play and document exhibits while you walk around. And I would like
to check out this mp3 module Chris just mentioned. And I certainly
think a lot of the ideas coming through the forum are interesting.

I just wouldn't want Chris to go through a John Nash (ha he).

Vic

[Incognito]

Internal mp3 playback would be good for presentations as you could have different themed music for different sections of your presentation. This would be harder to time with an external prog like winamp. You would probably also want a cross fader with this to make the transitions seamless if one piece did not finish before the other was to start. If you need some code you could always check out Freeamp which I believe is gpl'd and uses the xing encoder that Russell based his mod on.

[Dugger]

This is an amasing program! I would like to give Russell some cudos!

The biggest problem I find is that there is no ability to rotate, nor a button to go in reverse. Also, I find difficulty in judging my speed properly, too bad there isn't a speedometer or something, then again, seeing numbers on your screen might take away from it all.
Anyways, just a suggestion. Excellent work though.

[The Clickman]

Why not using the Wasabi core in to Celestia to add power of Winamp to play sound on Celestia ?

I think Winamp 3 will be the best audio player.
And this will alow us to play Mod, Wav, Audio CD, and more audio format inside Celestia... or use Celestia as vis plugin in Winamp.. we will be able to choose !

In this way I think this will be useful to make .cel script for a song, for example, and make a specific demo for a specific audio track

I'm already using Winamp 3 as beta, and Celestia.. making this two beautiful program working together will be the best thing can happend !

[Russell]

This is an amasing program! I would like to give Russell some cudos!

The biggest problem I find is that there is no ability to rotate, nor a button to go in reverse. Also, I find difficulty in judging my speed properly, too bad there isn't a speedometer or something, then again, seeing numbers on your screen might take away from it all.
Anyways, just a suggestion. Excellent work though.

You've hit the most common complaint so far, which is that the speed is hard to control. Several of my friends got a little too excited and zipped out of the known universe when they first tried it. A speedometer and SKO speed clamp would have been good, and will be on the top of my list if I ever make a new version.