1.3.1 prerelease

[JackHiggins]

Another idea for the next version:
A new class of object, "Lander" would be a nice addition, with the upcoming Beagle 2, MER-A and MER-B landings, and the large number of lander addons there are already!

Any good reason to distinguish between landers and spacecraft? I am working on a way to make it easy to place objects at fixed locations on the surfaces of planets, but a new class isn't involved.

--Chris

Just realised why there's a good reason- most of the objects on planet surfaces so far have been small landers, between 1 and 5m in radius. But when you try to make a large object to place on the surface, like a building, or a landscape surrounding a lander, it shows up as a bright dot from hundreds of km away.

Would it be easy to make a class of lander/surface feature/surface object etc that wouldn't show up as a dot from far away?

[selden]

Jack,

As I understand it, the brightness of the dot representing an object from far away is what is controlled by the Albedo declaration.

[marc]

Christophe, Im using a build that i made two days ago from CVS. Your autocompletion code works great, nice job.

[JackHiggins]

Jack,

As I understand it, the brightness of the dot representing an object from far away is what is controlled by the Albedo declaration.

Well, up to a point you're right, but not entirely.. Here's an example- i've used my lunarlandingsites.ssc, and made luna 2 with a radius of 10 & an albedo of 0, but still this happens:



I think, that Celestia thinks that the 2 are occulting (that's the right term, isn't it?) so it increases the brightness, even with a 0 albedo. It's just a bit annoying that's all...

[granthutchison]

Jack:
Try modifying the Color command:

Code: Select all

     Color [ 0 0 0 ]

That should turn off the reflected light as soon as your object no longer shows a disc.

Grant

[Guest]

Try a radius of 0.010

[JackHiggins]

Jack:
Try modifying the Color command:

Code: Select all

     Color [ 0 0 0 ]

That should turn off the reflected light as soon as your object no longer shows a disc.

Grant

Problem solved- thanks!

[Guest]

selden wrote :

One addition that didn't get mentioned is extremely important to those of us who like to see their deep space objects properly oriented.

When you've enabled "orientation editing" with Shift-Tilde (shift ~)
Ctrl-Shift Right-Mouse-Button now adjusts the rotational position around the Z axis.

This addition assumes that the Z axis of your model has been adjusted to point toward your viewpoint by using Ctrl-Shift Left-Mouse-Button.

This is a really interesting feature...
Is there a way to get the Axis and Angle values ?

This would really simplify our work if this could be extend to RA DEC and RADIUS value. It would really be interesting form those of us who try to match there add-on with surronding star.

Perhaps could celestia save the modification in the .ssc file or at least display them (in verbose for example)

[selden]

Is there a way to get the Axis and Angle values ?

Chris posted a description of how to do this quite some time ago. Detailed instructions are on the Web at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/billboard.html#6.0

I agree that it'd be extremely convenient if similar adjustments were available to adjust RA, Dec and Radius. Hopefully they'll appear in a future major release of Celestia. In the meantime, we'll just have to edit/restart/edit/restart.... *sigh*

[JackHiggins]

Hopefully they'll appear in a future major release of Celestia. In the meantime, we'll just have to edit/restart/edit/restart.... *sigh*

That's something I was thinking about for a long time... If celestia had something like a "reload" function...? (I have no idea if that would be hard to implement or not) It would be quite handy for testing out new addons though!