Version 1.6.1: stuff that needs testing

[ajtribick]

Chill out!

No-one's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use KDE 3.5.

[ajtribick]

Andrew,

unlike the previous one, this last patch of yours (urlpatch-trunk.diff) works nicely on my KDE3 version of trunk. Why don't you commit it, in order to settle this issue for now?

Fridger

Done. Hope this doesn't break it for everyone (again)...

[t00fri]

One just has to install KDE3 and Qt3 libs and headers for building the code

without getting into a debate over 3VS 4

qt3 and kde3 in most linux distros ( with the exception of legacy support) is just not there

All OpenSuSE 11.x distros offer of course KDE3/Qt3 support. Apparently also Ubuntu (-> Andrew)
Also SL6 includes kde 3.5/qt3 libs and some KDE3 applications.

That's enough for a Celestia-1.6.1- KDE3.

Most are going to qt4
--
so the 1.6.1 release
----- qt3 is on the out and qt4 is on the in ( see change log / svn commits)

There will surely be NO celestia -1.6.1-Qt4 and there won't be a KDE4 version for sure.
The porting from KDE3 to KDE4 would be a high extra effort that no one among us devs would support for a number of good reasons.

It has not yet been decided whether the release following 1.6.1 will already have a cross-platform Qt4 GUI. But I personally will vote for a Qt4 release ASAP.

---- there is a change in the wind -------------
------ "things are a changing "

Really?

As you know, the Qt4 GUI code is under development since quite a long time and is meanwhile quite stable with only few issues left. Still there is plenty of work ahead before a trunk release with Qt4 GUI could be ready. Our use of the Qt4 toolkit is, however, not directly motivated by Linux. It's just a good solution for creating a cross-platform GUI that implies a big reduction in OS porting efforts.

In view of the high interest in Win7 and MAC OSX, Linux considerations are clearly subdominant when it comes to distributing the available menpower in Celestia development. By focussing on a universal Qt4 GUI we can serve Linux without extra efforts.

Fridger

[Vincent]

I'm looking at one more Mac bug (though it's likely not even Mac-specific): The flashing that occurs when running some Lua scripts that present a 2D UI overlay.

Chris,

I've never noticed this flashing issue when using the Lua tools.
Could you please provide a script example that makes it happen ?

[Fenerit]

I've seen that also on Windows until SVN 50xx, then is desappeared. The "flash", in my case, concerned even the 3D models, which at load were "disassembled" on place and then quickly "reassembled".

[Cham]

I'm looking at one more Mac bug (though it's likely not even Mac-specific): The flashing that occurs when running some Lua scripts that present a 2D UI overlay.

Chris,

I've never noticed this flashing issue when using the Lua tools.
Could you please provide a script example that makes it happen ?

What Chris is refering to is the bug I reported with LUA in Celestia, under OS X Snow Leopard. I'm experiencing the bug on any Mac with OS X 10.6.x (whatever the version). It's a systematic bug, very easy to trigger. And a very annoying one, actually, since my LUA plug-in is pretty unusable because of the issue. It was working great on my old G5 dual (PPC) with OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Now, it doesn't anymore on any Intel Mac.

[ni1s]

How close are we to a release now?

[ajtribick]

Good question. It should be imminent but it has been like that for several months now...

Personally I would like to get this release out as soon as possible so we can concentrate on 1.7.0 which has some nice new features in it, but things are very quiet on the dev list at the moment.

[Cham]

There are three MAJOR bugs on the Mac version which need to be fixed before releasing the Mac version of Celestia 1.6.1.
Chris appears to have some difficulties in finding a proper solution. Here's a short description of the bugs :

1. Celestia crashes when the user switch Celestia from fullscreen to window mode. This bug is systematic and occurs on all Macs under any version of OS X. It occured again on my Mac yesterday, while doing a demonstration in front of a full classroom of 22 students in astronomy. I used by accident the keyboard shortcut (command-F) which triggered the bug. What a shame !

2. LUA has a strong problem when we try to add some interface overlay in Celestia (on a Mac with OS X Snow Leopard). The LUA windows are "flashing" or "blinking" in some random way. This is extremely frustrating since I've done a nice Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that works perfectly in Celestia, but it is "destroyed" by this Celestia-LUA bug. Chris has confirmed the problem but didn't found a solution yet. Strangely, this bug isn't occuring while using Celestia on my old PPC Mac (G5 dual) with OS X Tiger (10.4.x).

3. There's a strange texture rendering problem : normal maps, bump maps and specular maps aren't working properly. This problem is intermittent (random). If you start Celestia, the textures may be rendered correctly. But if you restart Celestia again, the textures may (frequently) be wrong. Apparently, Celestia is doing something wrong with its preferences files which is modified each time you quit Celestia. This bug is extremely frustrating and MUST be fixed. Strangely, I never experienced this bug on my old PPC Mac with OS X Tiger.

Since I'm using Celestia very frequently in the classroom and I'm using Celestia at home for addons development, I've found that the occurence frequency of bug #3 is about 3/4 = 75% of each Celestia restart. This is strange (while very frequent, that bug isn't systematic).

[ajtribick]

Are these bugs specific to 1.6.1, or are they also in 1.6.0 and trunk?

[Cham]

Are these bugs specific to 1.6.1, or are they also in 1.6.0 and trunk?

They are occuring in any version since a pretty long time. I can't tell when they appeared the first time.

I must insist that these three bugs are really major bugs which need to be adressed ASAP. Personaly, I can't see how Celestia 1.6.1 (Mac version) could be released without fixing these bugs.

[ajtribick]

What about the qt4 version?

[t00fri]

There is another pretty nasty bug in the trunk for Windows and I bet it is also in 1.6.1 for Windows.

The bug triggers as follows:

Suppose I am near Earth and center on M 74, say. Next I zoom in with SHIFT + mouse_left (forward) such as to make M 74 visible and fill an appreciable part of the screen.

At this point, the only action that is allowed with CTRL+mouse_left are rotations of M 74, while forward-backward movements with CTRL + mouse_left have no effect. The latter would amount to changing the physical distance when the observer is close to M 74. But in my example the observer is far away from M 74 (i.e. near Earth).

That is all correct so far. All other versions of Celestia have the same behaviour.

Now we come to the bug:

Store next M 74 in the bookmarks menu. Do a fresh start of Celestia and hit the M 74 bookmark. M 74 shows up in the correct size and location. BUT...

Now, one can change the physical distance by means of forward-backward movements with CTRL+mouse_left. That is INCORRECT.

In the Qt4 version, the bookmarked objects behave the same way as their originals. So here the bug is absent. Same for all Linux versions. Also here the bug is absent.

I have not found enough time and patience yet to fix this bug. It can't be hard. Perhaps someone else likes to do it.

Fridger

[ajtribick]

There's always another bug isn't there? I guess we wait another few more years before we release the next version of Celestia (be that 1.6.1 or 1.7.0)...

From what I understand, there are two entirely separate implementations of the bookmarks functionality: the Windows version and the one for all other platforms. So maybe it is time to migrate Windows over to the common system.

On the other hand these bugs are not 1.6.1-specific, the 1.6.1 branch is sufficiently different from the trunk that it gets awkward hunting these things down, and the development team is much reduced. At which point does it make more sense to release 1.6.1 as primarily a datafiles update to 1.6.0, and try and get these things fixed in 1.7.0 (not that I'm holding my breath that we'll get round to releasing that any time soon)...

[t00fri]

There's always another bug isn't there? I guess we wait another few more years before we release the next version of Celestia (be that 1.6.1 or 1.7.0)...

Well, Andrew,
I guess we had enough private exchanges about the status of Celestia development.

Fridger

[ajtribick]

Regarding the bug, it looks like the Windows bookmark is losing the follow object information. When I created the M 74 bookmark I was in "Follow Earth" mode and therefore the control+mouse movement was moving me inwards and outwards from Earth. On selecting the bookmark from the menu, I was in "Follow M 74" mode.

[chris]

Andrew is correct: the Windows version of Celestia is using it's own bookmark implementation that doesn't include field of view. I'm not sure why it's losing track of the follow object--this information should be preserved.

Do we want to spend the time maintaining a separate Windows version, or is that time better spent improving the Qt4 version? The Qt4 version of Celestia already has a bookmark implementation based on cel URLs that correctly stores field of view. It would be good if the Qt version of Celestia could import Win Celestia bookmark files.

--Chris

[ajtribick]

Well it looks like the obvious solution to the Windows bug is to move it to the same cel URL system as the other environments, and that's going to cause compatibility problems with existing bookmarks files. I'd personally suggest leaving this one alone for 1.6.1. For 1.7.0 I think qt4 is the way forward - not sure it is worth spending the effort (or that we have enough active developers) to support all the various interfaces.

As a non-Mac user I can't do much about Cham's list of bugs, any ideas there?

[t00fri]

Welcome back, Chris!

Do we want to spend the time maintaining a separate Windows version, or is that time better spent improving the Qt4 version? The Qt4 version of Celestia already has a bookmark implementation based on cel URLs that correctly stores field of view. It would be good if the Qt version of Celestia could import Win Celestia bookmark files.

My opinion should be clear since a long while: I am for spending all available dev resources on the cross-platform Qt4 version, hoping that a first release wouldn't take too long.

As I have expressed several times during the past 6 months, I advocate skipping 1.6.1. Other devs meanwhile seem to agree. A 1.6.1 release would admittedly update the astronomical database of Celestia 1.6.0, but it would come also with a number of remaining bugs, let alone a lot of outdated code structures. And no doubt, a first dot release such a long time after 1.6.0 simply looks bad.

As to Linux distros, most better GUI applications are meanwhile Qt4 based, either directly or via KDE4. An increasing number of gtk+ apps is being recently rewritten with Qt4 widgets. Celestia-KDE being still KDE3(qt3) based starts looking old, although it will continue to coexist happily in KDE4 desktop environments for a while. Anyway, a cross-platform Qt4 approach is certainly the preferrable timely approach also with regard to Linux environments.

Anyway as things appear recently, the available dev menpower is simply not sufficient for maintaining separate Windows, Mac and various Linux versions of Celestia.

Fridger

[ni1s]

What if there was two releases? 1.6.1 and 1.7.0_rc1(or 2.0_rc1 or whatever)?