Celestia 1.7.0 Development Thread

cartrite · Post #201by **cartrite** » 10.03.2019, 23:01

I've been running my Linux builds all day. They all read the files from usr/local/share/celestia. Even the version I installed with yast. I'm not sure why. Only 1 build I did long ago reads from a second folder usr/local/share/Celestia-QT. That one was built with qmake.

But mac runs on Darwin so its Unix based. Same behavior?

Post #202by **Lafuente_Astronomy** » 11.03.2019, 07:40

LukeCEL wrote:I'm not sure what you mean here. How did you install add-ons, and what do you mean by "after a while"?

Actually I take it back. The error I see is actually "Error opening Luahook "luahookinit.lua." So we actually have different problems.

Post #203by **onetwothree** » 11.03.2019, 18:35

LukeCEL wrote:If only Celestia could display the absolute path of the files it's reading, not just "data/asteroids.ssc" or whatever. Is this possible?

You don't need this actually. Instead put you working copy somewhere, e.g. $HOME/celestia, then define environment variable CELESTIA_DATA_DIR pointing to a location defined on the previous and run Celestia. Instead of /usr/local/... it will read data files from that location only.

Added after 26 minutes 30 seconds:
No need for mentioned #if 0 anymore on OSX.

LukeCEL · Post #204by **LukeCEL** » 11.03.2019, 21:21

cartrite wrote:But mac runs on Darwin so its Unix based. Same behavior?

Yep.

onetwothree wrote:You don't need this actually. Instead put you working copy somewhere, e.g. $HOME/celestia, then define environment variable CELESTIA_DATA_DIR pointing to a location defined on the previous and run Celestia. Instead of /usr/local/... it will read data files from that location only.

What does $HOME mean? And where do I define CELESTIA_DATA_DIR?

Post #205by **onetwothree** » 12.03.2019, 07:55

LukeCEL wrote:What does $HOME mean? And where do I define CELESTIA_DATA_DIR?

$HOME is your "home" directory (a directory created by OS to keep your files), you can check it using a bash (terminal window), just type

Code: Select all

echo $HOME

.

To define CELESTIA_DATA_DIR temporary use bash again:

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export CELESTIA_DATA_DIR=/path/to/your/celestia/data

, I have no idea how to add permanent env vars in OSX.

Post #206by **Lafuente_Astronomy** » 14.03.2019, 06:58

Hello Celestians! Tell me your thoughts on this, because I think it would be an interesting and innovative thing to include in Celestia:

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=18675

Post #207by **onetwothree** » 14.03.2019, 14:09

Personally I don't that think that fake asterisms seen from other systems is a something worth to add, but I have nothing against patches created by somebody else.

LukeCEL · Post #208by **LukeCEL** » 14.03.2019, 21:30

Sorry for the late reply. onetwothree, I tried your approach but it didn't seem to work.

cartrite wrote:I've been running my Linux builds all day. They all read the files from usr/local/share/celestia. Even the version I installed with yast. I'm not sure why. Only 1 build I did long ago reads from a second folder usr/local/share/Celestia-QT. That one was built with qmake.

But mac runs on Darwin so its Unix based. Same behavior?

I think I had a misunderstanding, or at least I didn't catch all of what you read. I thought if you were asking if the builds read from usr/local/share/celestia *within* the build's directory. (It doesn't seem to.) However, I think it does, like you said, read the data from usr/local/share/celestia! When I do make install, I usually typed:

Code: Select all

make install DESTDIR=~/Documents/celestia-test

or something, putting the executables in Documents/celestia-test, but not changing where the data was read from. (So on that note, sorry for wasting everyone's time.)

Also: thank you lrm25, pirogronian, and 375gnu for helping implement my comet tail suggestion. It looks very nice:

vpontin · Post #209by **vpontin** » 17.03.2019, 00:16

can someone make an update windows build in bintray? Thanks!

Post #210by **onetwothree** » 17.03.2019, 11:12

vpontin wrote:can someone make an update windows build in bintray? Thanks!

Done.

A new build 1.7.0~git20190317+cedca87 (see here) doesn't have many user visible changes, the most noticeable one is a data files update made by @Askaniy (dwarf planets, minor moons and other Solar system objects; Solar systems planets have better textures, Fobos & Deimos have new models). Other changes are: globulars now can have greek letters in their names (check Omega Cen and Xi Tucanae) thanks to @pirogronian, comet tails can have different colours (see a screenshot above), contributed by lrm25.

This version is build with enabled SPICE NAIF kernels support.

Post #211by **Lafuente_Astronomy** » 17.03.2019, 13:51

Just out of curiosity, when is th next major update of your 1.7.0 build? And can you tell me where you post all your developments? Thanks in advance

LukeCEL · Post #212by **LukeCEL** » 17.03.2019, 16:20

Lafuente_Astronomy wrote:And can you tell me where you post all your developments?

The official repository of Celestia is at https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia. I lurk there, and occasionally I'll submit an issue or something. Still haven't figured out pull requests and everything...

Post #213by **onetwothree** » 17.03.2019, 17:15

Lafuente_Astronomy wrote:Just out of curiosity, when is th next major update of your 1.7.0 build? And can you tell me where you post all your developments? Thanks in advance

LukeCEL's already posted the URL. We don't have any schedule for windows builds, generally I create them when we have some user visible changes.

vpontin · Post #214by **vpontin** » 18.03.2019, 22:57

Thanks for the new build onetwothree!

Added after 27 minutes 12 seconds:
Just one thing i noticed on the updated data files:

The dwarf planets added by this commit are duplicated by the entries on asteroids.ssc (Ceres) and outersys.ssc (Haumea, Eris and other TNOs).

What is the most accurate and what about merge the changes in the files on data directory?

(Also created an issue about this here)

Askaniy · Post #215by **Askaniy** » 19.03.2019, 05:32

I'll fix it today. It's most accurate to remove Ceres from the asteroids.ssc and dwarf planets from the outersys.ssc. The data directory doesn't support trajectories, so everything that requires additional resources is taken out of it.

vpontin · Post #216by **vpontin** » 20.03.2019, 02:04

Thanks Askaniy!

Post #217by **Lafuente_Astronomy** » 20.03.2019, 22:12

Hello Celestians!

For the Development of Celestia 1.7.0, is it possible to increase the number of stars and galaxies in the vanilla stars and galaxies file? I noticed that there are not a lot of stars and galaxies in Celestia, thus making the whole simulator mostly empty, at least when you go beyond the Milky Way. While of course modders will do their best to add those things, it would be better if there was more to the vanilla files so that modders will only have to add the ones recently discovered months ago. I'm asking this based from a concern raised by Art Blos here: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=18684&p=142660#p142660

And while doing so, Joey R pointed that many stars and galaxies have their sizes wrong, and as such, needs fixing. Here is his reply to a post about IC 1101, and my reply to him as well: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16439&p=142659#p142659

Thank you and more power to you!

LukeCEL · Post #218by **LukeCEL** » 20.03.2019, 23:34

Lafuente_Astronomy wrote:And while doing so, Joey R pointed that many stars and galaxies have their sizes wrong, and as such, needs fixing. Here is his reply to a post about IC 1101, and my reply to him as well: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16439&p=142659#p142659

I don't think this can really be helped, since Celestia just does its best to guess the radius of the star the parameters it has (spectral type, apparent magnitude, etc.). One idea would be for if Celestia set a maximum solar radius when estimating its radius. (Of course, if you wanted to, you would still have the option to set the Radius parameter to something higher.

I'm not sure what that limit would be, but Wikipedia seems to suggest 1500 solar radii.

vpontin · Post #219by **vpontin** » 20.03.2019, 23:47

I wonder if one day Celestia would be capable to handling Gaia's full catalog (and other probes cataloging other objects)

Post #220by **Lafuente_Astronomy** » 21.03.2019, 07:21

LukeCEL wrote:I'm not sure what that limit would be, but Wikipedia seems to suggest 1500 solar radii.

Actually, around 1800 Radii would do, since UY Scuti's Radii size is around 1700. And yes, probably a modification of Celestia's radii code would fix things up. I mean, accuracy is an important requirement of Astronomy, and if our measures are misleading due to the code, we may have some trouble, especially that Celestia is considered to be an educational astronomy software program.

vpontin wrote:I wonder if one day Celestia would be capable to handling Gaia's full catalog (and other probes cataloging other objects)

I'm pretty sure it can happen AND WILL HAPPEN. What needs to be done is probably to improve the Graphics handling capabilities(Not sure what the're called exactly) of Celestia to handle way more objects than before. If Gaia Sky, SpaceEngine and a few other younger programs can do it, why can't we?