List of active Celestia Windows developers

john71 · Post #1by **john71** » 27.12.2022, 09:33

Hi everybody!

It would be really helpful, if we can identify all Windows developers or wannabes.

I mean new ones and traditional ones.

Dear Selden and Ajtribick, can I ask politely what is your current status?

Can you join the development?

Post #2by **Art Blos** » 27.12.2022, 09:53

I can only help with testing and finding bugs. But I can do it on laptops and PCs of different capacities. I have in stock Windows 11, 10 and 7.

john71 · Post #3by **john71** » 27.12.2022, 11:01

Can I ask what is the status of Cartrite? Is he still active here?

Added after 7 minutes 42 seconds:
Is there anyone who knows Laurent Deru? Is he a user here?

Added after 55 minutes 10 seconds:
Can anyone reach out to:

Chris Laurel
Clint Weisbrod
Fridger Schrempp
Bob Ippolito or
Christophe Teyssier?

TheLostProbe · Post #4by **TheLostProbe** » 27.12.2022, 12:43

quick list i made

Current Windows developers:
- Levin? (sort of?)
- ajtribick
Past Windows developers:
- Chris and the rest of the previous dev team (including ajtribick)
- Fridger
- Alexell
- pirogronian (is open to returning to development when he is "feeling better")
Future Windows developers:
- Me
- nussun?
- EarthSolar (Chara)?
- Whoever else decides to join in the future

TheLostProbe · Post #5by **TheLostProbe** » 27.12.2022, 12:44

john71 wrote:Can anyone reach out to:

Chris Laurel

as long as his twitter DMs are open i can reach out to him

Post #6by **Art Blos** » 27.12.2022, 14:39

TheLostProbe wrote:Alexell

He definitely left the project forever.

Post #7by **SevenSpheres** » 27.12.2022, 17:18

john71 wrote:Dear Selden and Ajtribick, can I ask politely what is your current status?

Selden has never been a developer; I don't know why he has the forum role.

john71 wrote:Is there anyone who knows Laurent Deru? Is he a user here?

I think that's the developer of Cosmonium.

Post #8by **Anthony_B_Russo10** » 27.12.2022, 22:37

Selden has never been a developer; I don't know why he has the forum role.

From what I can tell going off of the documentation, Selden has that role due to testing many prerelease versions for the dev team.

john71 · Post #9by **john71** » 28.12.2022, 09:55

The version of Cosmographia provided by NAIF is an extension of the open source Cosmographia application originally developed by Chris Laurel of Fifth Star Labs LLC in 2010-2011. NAIF is pleased that Chris has agreed to allow us to release the JPL-extended version of his program.

For rendering, Cosmographia uses the open source VESTA library from Astos Solutions. NAIF thanks Astos Solutions for permission to use the VESTA library in the JPL-extended version of this program.

In 2014-2015 Eric Ferguson, Andrew Hall and Jonathan Castello have developed the initial set of JPL extensions to Cosmographia, with the Europa Clipper and Cassini projects, and NASA’s Advanced Multi-Mission Operations System (AMMOS), providing the funding.

Since 2016, under contract with NAIF, Chris Laurel of Fifth Star Labs LLC continues development of JPL extensions to Cosmographia using funding provided by the Planetary Data System.

https://cosmoguide.org/credits/

Maybe we can contact some of these gentlemen.

Added after 36 minutes 40 seconds:
Maybe a community financed Patreon-like solution with Fifth Star Labs LLC could work to enable an EXCLUSIVELY Windows based new Celestia fork.

https://nick-risinger.squarespace.com/

Post #10by **selden** » 28.12.2022, 14:52

john71 wrote:Hi everybody!

It would be really helpful, if we can identify all Windows developers or wannabes.

I mean new ones and traditional ones.

Dear Selden and Ajtribick, can I ask politely what is your current status?

Can you join the development?

Maybe. It depends on how easy it is to build Celestia from scratch under Windows. Someone would have to provide step-by-step instructions to get me started.

My role in Celestia's development used to be as a beta-tester under Windows. This was long ago, when Chris Laurel was still the primary author. I regularly built the beta versions of Celestia from source code. Often I was able to provide the code to fix the bugs that I encountered. Unfortunately, the free version of Microsoft's Visual Studio kept changing and the VS framework that came with Celestia's source code didn't always keep up. Eventually Celestia just wouldn't build under VS on my computer any more, no matter what I tried. At that point I could only report problems without the fixes for them, which meant that they often didn't get fixed.

Unfortunately, I also have some philosophical differences with the direction of Celestia's development. I *intensely* dislike QT, for example. One reason is that QT's software keeps changing in incompatible ways without being able to keep its versions separate while doing software development.

Post #11by **Art Blos** » 28.12.2022, 15:12

selden wrote:Unfortunately, I also have some philosophical differences with the direction of Celestia's development. I *intensely* dislike QT, for example. One reason is that QT's software keeps changing in incompatible ways without being able to keep its versions separate while doing software development.

Don't care about QT. Help Gleb to make a work properly the native interface.

john71 · Post #12by **john71** » 28.12.2022, 15:43

selden wrote:Unfortunately, I also have some philosophical differences with the direction of Celestia's development. I *intensely* dislike QT, for example.

You are not alone in this, I'm sure.

Added after 5 hours 12 minutes:
Cosmonium already supports some Celestia addons (though CMOD and CelX are not yet supported).

Interesting.

Post #13by **Art Blos** » 29.12.2022, 05:29

john71 wrote:though CMOD and CelX are not yet supported

Very important things are not supported.

john71 · Post #14by **john71** » 29.12.2022, 08:10

Art Blos wrote:john71 wrote:
though CMOD and CelX are not yet supported
Very important things are not supported.

But it proves that Laurent Deru knows Celestia and he is interested in it and he can make a Windows software...

Added after 5 minutes 13 seconds:
Dear Mr Deru (dear Laurent), is there a better way to understand Celestia than to help finish version 1.7?

Please help us.

:pray:

TheLostProbe · Post #15by **TheLostProbe** » 29.12.2022, 11:26

eldee (Laurent) is NOT a C++ or GLSL (at least i think) developer. he works with Python when developing for Cosmonium. C++ and Python are completely different from one another. he can not help

john71 · Post #16by **john71** » 29.12.2022, 11:35

TheLostProbe wrote:he can not help

Damn.

John Van Vliet · Post #17by **John Van Vliet** » 29.12.2022, 15:21

unlike selden i like QT but i am Linux ONLY i have ZERO interest in Microsoft

john71 · Post #18by **john71** » 30.12.2022, 07:08

Is Janus a developer? Can he help with the Windows version?

Do you know anything about him?

john71 · Post #19by **john71** » 31.12.2022, 09:39

Cartrite wrote in another thread:

No I am not a developer. I can do some bug fixes and I build with Windows. But I'm not a developer.

Added after 1 hour 15 minutes:
Celestia 1.6 Beginners Guide: Learn Celestia fast! Paperback – August 7, 2014
by Mr Thomas Ecclestone (Author)

Thomas Ecclestone is a software programmer and technical writer from Kent in the south east of England. In his spare time he looks after a herd of hebridean sheep, and lives on a smallholding in Kent, and writes books.

https://www.amazon.com/Celestia-1-6-Beginners-Guide-Learn/dp/1500758698

Do you know this gentleman?

Markerz · Post #20by **Markerz** » 31.12.2022, 11:33

Windows only development is mostly dead (I mean in general, not specific to Celestia). The win32 version of Celestia (using raw Win32 API) is very outdated because Win32 is old and it is not a modern way to develop Windows apps. Very very few people write raw Win32 code now, so I do not see new developers join in help with that frontend, and do not see new features coming to the win32 front end.

The UWP version of Celestia I developed depends on the Windows only UWP environment, it was the future of developing Windows apps but it was abandoned by Microsoft too. So I don't see a hope for that either. The suggested toolkit to move to for Windows app, WinUI (and I want to move the UWP codebase to) does not support OpenGL or even OpenGL via ANGLE for now, so we cannot use that either. And I guess many people would dislike UWP and WinUI because they are Win10+ only.

none of all the Windows only UI toolkit is a good choice for Celestia to grow on Windows. The only way I think for Windows to get supported is via cross platform toolkit like Qt (and I think at one point of time onetwothree is looking for alternatives) which means the need for windows dev is not that strong (other than testing).