1.3.0 Prerelease

[alegator]

By the way, my previous post referred to the 1.3 prerelease version

[granthutchison]

Chris:
Any chance of including a texture map of Enceladus in the definitive 1.3.0 release? It's an anomaly that Celestia provides decent textures for all the mapped major bodies in the solar system except Enceladus.
A 1k texture based on Stooke's public domain map at http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/geography/spacemap/encylmos.jpg wouldn't increase the download time too much, would it?

Grant

[Sum0]

The NormalMap declaration was defined back in January. As I recall, Fridger posted a description to the forum of how to create normal maps in place of the usual bumpmaps.

Fridger cleverly discovered how to make Celestia use a normal map without any modifications to the program by setting BumpHeight to 0. As of Celestia 1.3.0pre1, normal maps are officially supported in .ssc files via the NormalMap field.

--Chris

Forgive me if i've missed something, but what does a normal map do, as opposed to a bump map? Do I need to use a "normal map" if i'm using a bump map?

[t00fri]

The NormalMap declaration was defined back in January. As I recall, Fridger posted a description to the forum of how to create normal maps in place of the usual bumpmaps.

Fridger cleverly discovered how to make Celestia use a normal map without any modifications to the program by setting BumpHeight to 0. As of Celestia 1.3.0pre1, normal maps are officially supported in .ssc files via the NormalMap field.

--Chris

Forgive me if i've missed something, but what does a normal map do, as opposed to a bump map? Do I need to use a "normal map" if i'm using a bump map?

Both normal maps and bump maps serve to characterize the "bumpyness" of a given surface. The two maps may correspondingly be transformed into each other.

The point is that if you want to profit from the hardware supported speed of the DXT format, you have to use a normal map instead of a bump map. Bump maps are converted /internally/ into normal maps...

Bye Fridger

[billybob884]

Feature Request: Ok, so it's not really a feature request, more of an idea, anyway, could the next release have a few changes in the solarsys.ssc file. Could you just make it so all the comets, asteroids and, well, pretty much everything after charon are in a seperate file in the extras directory or something? Just to give it a little more organization.

[t00fri]

Feature Request: Ok, so it's not really a feature request, more of an idea, anyway, could the next release have a few changes in the solarsys.ssc file. Could you just make it so all the comets, asteroids and, well, pretty much everything after charon are in a seperate file in the extras directory or something? Just to give it a little more organization.

Do you mean that all bodies belonging to our solar system should go out of solarsys.ssc into another file?;-). Sorry, I just stumbled over a "knot" in my brain...

I am sure you are aware that the asteroids coming after Charon in solarsys.ssc are actually located closer to the Sun than Charon...

Bye Fridger

[billybob884]

i mean just all the asteroids, comets, ect. after charon should go into a seperate file from the solarsys.ssc

[t00fri]

i mean just all the asteroids, comets, ect. after charon should go into a seperate file from the solarsys.ssc

Given the fact that the asteroids are part of our solar system (=> solarsys.ssc!), why do you want to split them off?

Bye Fridger

[billybob884]

i just thought it would make it a little more organized to have hte main body objects in one file and the rest in another one

[t00fri]

i just thought it would make it a little more organized to have hte main body objects in one file and the rest in another one

Does this mean that you propose to put all the /moons/ of the main bodies into the second file as well, since these are not "main bodies" either?;-)

Bye Fridger

[Psykotik]

Mike is trying to say (if I understand right) the upgrade of Celestia is a pain... so many addons to move, so many paragraphs to change by hand...

A shorter solarsys should be easier to manage when the time of the upgrade will come ! That's what is meant when talking about "organisation".

IMHO, I think the work would be done on the upgrading procedure of Celestia.

[ANDREA]

... The biggest new feature in 1.3.0 is multiview. Currently, all views have the same time and render options, but we'll fix that soon.....
--Chris

Chris, my most sincere thanks for the new release, and mainly for its multiview capability. I have put on the same screen the 9 Solar System Planets, and to day I showed them to some friends, that were astonished by the beauty of the images.
I'm waiting for the moment I'll show on a 2x3 meter wide screen to the school students ALL the planets running with their different speeds, inclinations, etc. or many asteroids, comets, all on the same screen.
Wonderful!
Just a little request: should it be possible, when finished to insert the objects, to eliminate the blue rectangle, for example with a right mouse click?
It's a bit too much visible, and moreover disturbs the screen homogeneity.
I've tried to obtain the CEL Url, and I'm attaching hit, hope will be OK.
Thank you again, Chris!
Andrea

cel://Follow/Sol:Earth/2003-02-26T12:20 ... 40839&lm=0

[ANDREA]

I've tried to obtain the CEL Url, and I'm attaching it, hope will be OK.
Andrea

cel://Follow/Sol:Earth/2003-02-26T12:20 ... 40839&lm=0

As you see, the URL shows ONLY the boxed image, the Earth, while on the screen there were all the 9 planets. Is this a bug or it has been chosen in this way? Or I made a mistake?
Thank you again

Andrea

[chris]

Chris:
Any chance of including a texture map of Enceladus in the definitive 1.3.0 release? It's an anomaly that Celestia provides decent textures for all the mapped major bodies in the solar system except Enceladus.
A 1k texture based on Stooke's public domain map at http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/geography/spacemap/encylmos.jpg wouldn't increase the download time too much, would it?

Grant

Omission corrected. I've added the texture for Enceladus. To keep the texture memory usage reasonable for the Saturnian system, I resized the map to just 512x256.

--Chris

[Redfish]

Would it be possible for the tedious ssc editing to have a menu in celestia itself that would work something like the solarsystem browser, but then would allow you to set the parameters for the planet with a graphic interface, so that you can just select a texture for low medium and high resolution. Adjust the bump mapping cloud height etc with a slider or something, and then if anyhow possible to show up immediately in celestia (with some delay of course if the textures are large).

So that this interface allows you to edit the solarsys.ssc instead of doing it in notepad.

Therby making it possible to have different filenames for different resolution maps, and this will of course make the different folders less obsolete than they are at the moment, cuz everyone places his textures in medres anyway.

[MKruer]

OK I am off the board for a few months and already there’s a new version!?

I agree that the .ssc files should be able to be split into smaller pieces. The easiest way I see to implement this is to make it possible for one .ssc to call another .scc file

Something to the effect “import planet-x.ssc”

The files would be parsed as needed, and you could separate each entity/object into its own file.

Also chris to do you plan to clean up the directory for the 1.3 release?
(reference) http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1076

Finally you one said that the biggest problem with the directory cleanup is with the images, and what to do about texture resolutions. I think the simplest solution is to make the resolution user definable by adding an attribute to the texture command.

So now

Texture "earth.jpg"

Would be written like

Texture(1) “earth2k.jpg”
Texture(2) “earth4k.jpg”
Texture(3) “earth8k.jpg”
Texture(4) “earth16k.jpg”
Etc…

Where the number (#) refers to an increase in the resolution of the image. This would replace the need for the current separate directory for different resolutions. And as an added benefited you now have more resolutions to play with (0-9)

[Redfish]

I have to say the FOV function has changed for the better it's a lot faster now.

I also like the indicator for time travel at lightspeed.

Maybe sometime the option could be added so that when you are travelling towards stars you'll see a blueshift and when yer travelling away from stars you see a red shift(if i got it correctly, might be the other way around).

I'd also like to have a function for making the galaxies look brighter and also for the stars, cuz i still prefer not to use the show stars as textures. Even though you see the color of the star far better than when rendered as points, it still looks a bit unrealistic to me, so maybe either decrease the size of the texture for a star so that it looks about half as big, or add some function to increase the brightness of the stars when shown as points.

[granthutchison]

Maybe sometime the option could be added so that when you are travelling towards stars you'll see a blueshift and when yer travelling away from stars you see a red shift(if i got it correctly, might be the other way around).

That would be pretty, but very unrealistic. At lightspeed you would "see" all the stars condensed into an infinitely blueshifted dimensionless point dead ahead. But you would only see it for zero time before you arrived at your destination! And at Celestia's trans-light virtual velocities, it's difficult to know what you might see - nothing resembling the real world, for sure.

Grant

[Redfish]

Ok maybe yer right, but some effect would be nice though. Maybe change color towards the blue until you reach lightspeed and then leave it at that until you slow down.

Something like the effect in star trek series, the stars also seem to change color when they decellerate.

[Darkmiss]

I have already split my SoslarSys file up into smaller chunks.
all i have left in my solarsys file is all the Planets, Deep space spacecraft, and the main asteroids. (Ida, Dactyl, Eros.... ect ect.)

Then im my extras folder i have an scc file for....

A_EarthSatalites.ssc ( Moon, and all SpaceCraft )
B_MarsSatalites.ssc ( Phobos, Demios and both Space craft )
C_JupiterSatalites.ssc ( all 40 moons )
D_SaturnSatlites.ssc ( all 30 moons )
E_UranusSatalites.ssc ( all 22 moons )
F_NeptuneSatalites.ssc ( all 8 moons )
G_Comets.ssc ( all comets together )
H_Nebula ( just Ngc1999 so far )
I_AsteroidBelt.ssc ( god knows how many asteroids from the main belt )

The alphabets letters ( A_ ect.. ect.) are to keep the file to load in in the order i want.
Because if the Asteroid belt was to load in first
all other files would be at the bottom of a long list, in the solar system browser.

If you think this is organised, you should see my directory structure on my hard drive, now thats clean....