I found Celestia addictive for a short while... nowadays I rarely run it, and only then to check the orientation of a planet, or the position of a galaxy... I'm still using 1.2.5 and I'm not particularly interested in updating.
I've found it easy to become disillusioned with Celestia due to the lacklustre state of the Celestia universe outside the solar system. People seem to be more interested in planets and hi-res planetary textures... personally if I want to explore the Solar System,
Orbiter is far more interesting and rewarding.
I put this down to the fact that fleshing out the rest of the Universe with the data we do have will require dynamic detail systems, which could allow a multitude of wonderful things:
* 3-D surface terrain
* Ring particle systems
* Emission/absorption nebulae delineating spiral arms
* Star clouds and globular clusters
Why Celestia doesn't have dynamic detail yet is not simple, but I'm sure it's one or a combination of the following things:
1) People are working on how to do it, but it's very slow going;
2) Dynamic detail got pushed into the "too hard" corner in favour of simpler features like virtual textures and multi-views;
3) Political opposition to dynamic detail on the grounds that it requires too much speculation (or that if someone other than Chris does it, it's "sabotaging the spirit" or some such rubbish).
This comes down to my desire for a more complete Celestia universe, so don't bother arguing about whether Celestia development is on the right track for most people - it probably is. But it'll need dynamic detail for me to be interested in it again.
That's why I still read this forum every few days - that, and I find many of the discussions here to be intelligent and interesting (except for the Windows-bagging which, frankly, becomes rather tedious).
Cheers,
Paul
