Which are the most underdeveloped parts of Celestia?

[john71]

This thread is about criticizing Celestia.

Not the development team, just the current state of the software and it's add-ons.

As I see, some of the new members are trying to express their frustration in other topics, which can be problematic.

We should centralize all the frustration.

So let's blow off steam!

[Goofy]

Hi.
One, present from Celestia beginning, it the very poor rendering of far stars.
None of the three options gives a realistic appearance of them.
Goofy.

[Art Blos]

1) Poor look of galaxies;
2) Poor look of cometary tail
3) Poor look of star crown;
4) Poor look of black holes;
5) Lack of relief on planets;
6) Lack of secondary shadows on objects (for example on spacecraft);
7) Errors between VSOP87 and DE431;
8) Not a red Moon during an eclipse;
9) One model for all periods of the object's existence.

I have not written anything new.

[john71]

For me the biggest problem is the lack of real time editing of add-ons.

It can be very-very-very frustrating.

I know it is related to the core logic of the software design, but this is the most frustrating part for me.

[Art Blos]

10) Lack of choice of alternative textures for clouds;
11) Lack of choice of alternative textures for photosphere;
12) Disappearing objects from the eclipse calculator, if this object has a model.

[Eric Nelson]

How about a lack of things such as the life cycle of stars and nebulae evolution along with pm (proper motion) and plate tectonics on terrestrial bodies like Earth for example.
Plus no tides or anything related and no universe expansion.

[trappistplanets]

stars and galaxies don't move

10) Lack of choice of alternative textures for clouds;

yes! that is a must have

4) Poor look of black holes;

yes black holes need magor updates, ie, gravitational lenses, acreation disks (like ones in space engine) (not all black holes have disks however)

some neutron stars are so massive that some of them tend to have gravitational lenzing, same goes for entire galaxies, this was clealy observed with hubble

[Art Blos]

How about a lack of things such as the life cycle of stars and nebulae evolution along with pm (proper motion) and plate tectonics on terrestrial bodies like Earth for example.
Plus no tides or anything related and no universe expansion.

Don't ask too much from Celestia. All of the above requires a huge amount of data.

[trappistplanets]

1) Poor look of galaxies;

2) Poor look of cometary tail

yeah, galaxies and comet tails could use some updates and changes
a galaxy by default should resemble something like this (looks of all galaxies will be different) (this is just ngc 4414)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/th ... 1200px-NGC_4414_(NASA-med).jpg
not a boring low quality blue sprite model with a orange core, as for elliptical galaxies, we should use luke's models, but make them galaxies by default instead of nebulae

[DaveBowman2001]

I know this issue has been solved in 1.7.0, but....
Render limit for non-DSC objects at 10 million LY is the most frustrating for me

[john71]

Don't ask too much of Celestia. All of the above requires a huge amount of data.

I think these can be solved by relatively simple methods.

Solution 1:

"Movie" GIF files as textures

Solution 2:

Temporal textures: I mean a texture should have a TEMPORAL COORDINATE assigned to it.

Like: tempcoor -100000 to -10000000. So the texture will be seen between those temporal coordinates, in years.

[DaveBowman2001]

In addition, the surface of terrestrial worlds are flat

[john71]

In addition, the surface of terrestrial worlds are flat

Yes, we should use cmod files for moons and planets.

[Art Blos]

"Movie" GIF files as textures

In this format too many restrictions.

Yes, we should use cmod files for moons and planets.

There is such an opportunity even now. But in order for a noticeable relief to appear on large planets, the model must have 1-10 millions of polygons. Better to implement existing technology that turns normal maps into real relief.

[john71]

In this format too many restrictions.

What about WebP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

Better to implement existing technology that turns normal maps into real relief.

I agree.

[trappistplanets]

In addition, the surface of terrestrial worlds are flat

there needs to be procedual surface topograpy based on the given bump map, and when your really close, the game can just randomly prodedualy render topogeaphy that was unable to be specified in the bump map

Added after 23 seconds:

Yes, we should use cmod files for moons and planets.

if the meshes are way to high poly, some computers will not like that

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

Like what John1 said, there is a need of real tie addon updating. It would really help with install with a large number of addons that cause the program to take a while to load.
More supported model file types, like obj models.

[Gurren Lagann]

Performance improvements with extremely large catalogs, and render limits for hyperdistant quasars.

[jjcatloaf123]

Celestia Origin>Celestia.

[Anthony_B_Russo10]

Celestia Origin>Celestia.

CO is meant to be an addon, it is far to hefty to shipped standard.