Hi all, and sorry for the late reply. First of all, allow me to put some context on why I started my app : a few years ago, around the time Celestia was apparently definitively dead, I wanted to learn more about 3D programming and OpenGL. I thought I would just do what almost everyone tries in his life, make a small solar system, watch the sphere orbiting around and move on to something else. But instead I kept working on it, and from a small toy app it grew largely out of my expectations.
When Celestia rose from the ashes, I did ask myself if I should stop developing it or keep going on. That's where I realized that I was no longer aiming at the same goal than Celestia, my interest had slowly moved from hardcore astronomy towards procedural generation, virtual worlds, physically based rendering, etc.. So, even though there is some overlap (we share after all the same universe
), I thought there was sense to continue on my own and focus even more on those topics.
That said, I would gladly discuss how to steer the two projects (and avoid a collision course) and benefit from each other, there has been some nice constructive suggestions in this thread already.
Merging the two projects, as someone mentioned, as it is an almost impossible task: there are huge differences in term of programming languages, architecture, and so on that the effort doing so would actually be similar to creating a third application.
On the other hand, more focused collaborations are, I believe, feasible. One of my ideas, that I think I discussed in the past with someone from this forum, is to provide the procedural generation code as a standalone app. So one could use it to generate virtual textures, meshed objects,... and use them directly in Celestia as add-ons (and perhaps in the future as a plugin for Celestia, as the dependencies would be minimal)
The idea of a common core or libraries used then by several apps targeting different usages is really enticing, and it could indeed be a good way to combine our respective efforts. Though, this will still require some non-negligible amount of discussion, work and the balance of benefit should be carefully evaluated; and if it happens it will take time too.
