Celestia 1.3.2 prerelease

[chris]

I've made a prerelease of Celestia 1.3.2 for Windows available:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... .2pre1.exe

Harald has graciously mirrored it here:

http://www.h-schmidt.net/celestia/celes ... .2pre1.exe

Here are some of the changes:
* Added support for extended character sets (most of WGL4) and UTF-8 encoded strings
* Updated info display to show apparent size of selected object
* Enable tab completion of location names
* Added view management commands for Lua scripting
* Introduced support for JPL ephemeris files
* Fixed crash in Windows star browser that occurred after changing the number of stars and pressing return.
* Fixed bug that made stars and galaxies appear square when certain nebulae were in view.
* Made the delete button in the Windows bookmarks organizer actually work
* Updated orbits for Amalthea and Phoebe
* Fixed seams in Jupiter and Phobos textures
* Spacecraft orbit paths adaptively sampled for smoother results

--Chris

[Bob Hegwood]

Chris,

Don't know how or why, but the new version also removed a problem I was having in trying to display the rings of Uranus.

Just thought I'd let you know about it.

Thanks, Bob

[Darkmiss]

Is it me or have you done some work on the terminator recently too
seems to look a lot better, and load a lot smoother in fullscreen too.

also a lot of updated asteroid models too
great stuff

[granthutchison]

It seems like new models for Halley, Larissa and Pandora didn't go out with 1.3.2pre1 , so these bodies are just empty spaces.
Download the necessary models direct from the CVS tree at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/models/.

I've prepared IAU location files to exploit Celestia's new ability to handle accented characters, and also to revise the 3ds model locations now that I've got those behaving correctly with Mark and Goto. There's no longer any need to shift the longitude by 180 degrees to get the features to plot in the correct place, and in fact the previous IAU location files will now plot 180 degrees out of alignment on 3ds models in 1.3.2 . However, the good news is that I'm pretty sure that this is the last necessary tweak in the long story of fixing up the 3ds models to behave consistently in Celestia - there shouldn't be any more revisions to the IAU locations files except to add new locations or revised nomenclature as these come along.
I've sent these new files to Chris, and I'm hoping he'll make them available in parallel with the older locations files that are compatible with 1.3.1, which are currently available at http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/celestia/files/locations/.
Meanwhile, if anyone just can't wait to get their hands on locations files (beyond the Earth) to go with 1.3.2pre1, drop me an IM and I'll e-mail you a zip - 98k the lot.

Grant

[miket6065]

I don't know why but now Celestia won't run. I get a "Program not responding" error message.

MikeT

[chris]

Grant's latest locations files are now available here:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/locations/1.3.2/

You can grab individual .ssc files, or a ZIP with all of them:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/ ... ations.zip

--Chris

[Bob Hegwood]

I've prepared IAU location files to exploit Celestia's new ability to handle accented characters, and also to revise the 3ds model locations now that I've got those behaving correctly with Mark and Goto. There's no longer any need to shift the longitude by 180 degrees to get the features to plot in the correct place, and in fact the previous IAU location files will now plot 180 degrees out of alignment on 3ds models in 1.3.2 . Grant

Thanks *very* much for your work on these models and locations, Grant. I'm about to revisit the JupiterTour script to see how they work now. I'll let you know in a day or two when I - hopefully - put the revised JupiterTour script on my web page.

Then, I'm going to do Saturn. If been wanting to do Saturn for about two months now, but you guys keep changing Celestia's capabilities so quickly that I just can't keep up.

Don't any of you developer types have normal LIVES to live too?

At any rate, thanks again Grant.

Take care, Bob

[Bob Hegwood]

Chris,

One other note for you on 1.3.2 Pre1...

I absolutely *love* the opening screen sequence now. It appears that you've given the system enough time to display the logo for a while as you travel to Io.

Previously, I rarely even saw the Celestia Logo. The first view I had of anything on my screen was Io.

Again, just thought I'd let you know. I *like* being able to see the opening logo.

Take care, Bob

[Bob Hegwood]

I don't know why but now Celestia won't run. I get a "Program not responding" error message.MikeT

Mike,

You're going to have to be a bit more specific if you want help with this problem. What version of Celestia? What Operating System? What are the details of the error? What do you do to start the program?

Have you re-booted and tried again?

Be *specific* son...

Take care, Bob

[chris]

I absolutely *love* the opening screen sequence now. It appears that you've given the system enough time to display the logo for a while as you travel to Io.

Glad that you like it . . . But, you should thank Harald for this--he's the one who fixed the timing problem.

--Chris

[Jeam Tag]

Congratulations for the evolution of Celestia, increasingly more impressive!

Chris, Fridger, Grant;
I have a little question about some great Locations that appear in last releases: for example Celestia\data\"world_capitals.ssc" that i try to translate in french (with report countries in #line)
See my Work in progress herehttp://jeam.tag.free.fr/CELESTIAhtml/Fichiers.ssc/world-capitals.ssc
1/ I did not find all equivalences yet, especially for the small states, associates, territories or possessions of other countries: Help
2/ I had not proposed this file yet, because I could not use the characters accentuated in Celestia: as that seems from now on possible, how should my small file be corrected? I have to test rewrite (wordpad) but it does not seem to work. (I am not a programmer!)
Jeam

[Bob Hegwood]

I've prepared IAU location files to exploit Celestia's new ability to handle accented characters, and also to revise the 3ds model locations now that I've got those behaving correctly with Mark and Goto. -Grant

Grant,

I've used the new locations files and models with great success in Celestia 1.3.2 Pre1...

Just so's you know about it though, you need to be aware that if I try to edit a location file, and then save it back to my disk in its original location, I run the risk of LOSING the location labels almost entirely.

Let me explain...

If I try to add a Tyre Macula location to the jupmoons2.ssc file, and then save it back to my disk, the whole location processing function in Celestia goes bonkers. I lose almost ALL of the previously-working locations from Europa.

I thought that this might have been because I tried to save the file via Notepad, even though I specified the UTF-8 text encoding. If I restore the original file you gave to me, the problem goes away.

What gives? Do I need to do something special when saving these files? Can I no longer create special locations files for use with my scripts? Remember, I added a short one for the Jupiter Tour just to show the beginning and ending locations of the Gipul Catena. Can I no longer do this?

Or, as usual, am I just missing something here? Do I need to use WordPad?

Thanks, Bob

[Falck]

What is the extent of the JPL ephemeris file support? Is this DE403/5/6 support, or SPICE kernel (spk) support?

Can these be used as the ephemerides for planets and moons, or are they intended only for spacecraft?

[granthutchison]

If I try to add a Tyre Macula location to the jupmoons2.ssc file, and then save it back to my disk, the whole location processing function in Celestia goes bonkers. I lose almost ALL of the previously-working locations from Europa.

Bob, if you open the original file in a hex editor like XVI32 and compare it to the file Notepad saved for you, you'll find that Notepad has inserted three characters at the start of the file (and perhaps also a little later in the first line): these have hex codes EE BB BF, and they don't show up when you look at the file in Notepad, but they mess up the file in Celestia. Here's what Chris told me when he identified the problem:

I think that I know what's going on here . . . This sequence encodes the Unicode character fffe (zero-width non-breaking space), which is placed by some tools as byte-order marker in Unicode files. But it doesn't serve any function when it has been UTF-8 encoded, as UTF-8 is byte order independent encoding. It causes problems with the Celestia parser, because the parser is designed to reject extended characters that appear outside of quoted strings.

I find this sequence is inserted by both Word and Notepad, but I've successfully edited UTF-8 locations files in Wordpad without the extra characters appearing. An alternative is just to open the file in a hex editor and delete the three offending characters before resaving.
Basically, the extra characters kill the whole file for Celestia - the few locations you're left with are the ones from solsys_locs.ssc, the small locations file that distributes with Celestia.

BTW: Tyre Macula has no official existence any more, which is why it isn't in the locations file: it is now classified as a "large ring feature" with the unmodified name Tyre - you'll find it already listed as such in the location file for Jupiter's moons.

Grant

[granthutchison]

Bob:
Some other options for you:

1) Your locations file only need to be in UTF-8 if they contain accented characters: if you have no accented characters you can just save the file as plain ASCII, exactly as you've done in the past. So if you just want to add a couple of locations, write them into a small plain text file and drop that file into the same directory as your other locations files.

2) Even if a few accented characters are required, you can still avoid the hassles of UTF-8 by inserting them in a plain ASCII file using their Unicode hex codes (this is what Fridger has done with his Earth locations file). In place of an accented character, you type "\uXXXX", where the Xs indicate the four hex digits of the Unicode code. You can find this code for an accented character by browsing the various Latin alphabet pages of the Unicode code charts. (Most of the common characters are in Latin-1 Supplement.)
So to write "Bo?tes" I'd type "Bo\u00f6tes" into my ASCII file, since 00f6 is the code for the character "?".

Grant

[Guest]

BTW: Tyre Macula has no official existence any more, which is why it isn't in the locations file: it is now classified as a "large ring feature" with the unmodified name Tyre - you'll find it already listed as such in the location file for Jupiter's moons. Grant

Just my luck... One of the features I selected for use with the Jupiter Tour no longer exists.

Okay, no big deal. I just wanted to make sure that YOU knew what happened when I tried to edit the file. I'll use WordPad from now on.

Thanks for all of the advice. This is way more than I *ever* wanted to know about UTF-8, text-encoding, ASCII, hex-editors, etc.

As usual, you've enlightened me beyond expectations.

Thanks again sir.

Take care, Bob

[ElPelado]

Here are some of the changes:
* Added support for extended character sets (most of WGL4) and UTF-8 encoded strings
* Enable tab completion of location names
* Added view management commands for Lua scripting
* Introduced support for JPL ephemeris files

I have some questions about the new improvments:
1) What is the extended characters sets??(WGL4 and UTF-8)
2) Can I hit [ENTER], type a location in a planet, [ENTER] and then go to the location??
3) What is LUA???
4) What are the JPL ephemeris files??

If someone can answer me, I will really apreciate it!
Thanks...

[selden]

Some quick answers:

1) They are character encodings (ASCII is a 7bit character encoding which is a subset of UTF-8 ) which let you represent most languages' glyphs. See the FAQ at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
WGL4 (Windows Glyph List v4.0) is a subset of UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format - 8bit)

2) Yes. But first you must turn on "Label Features" in the Render "Locations..." menu.

3) A programming language designed to be embedded in other programs.

4) Highly precise formulas for calculating the positions of the planets and moons of the solar system. They are more accurate than VSOP-87 and much better than simple Keplerian orbits. They are used by the Horizons ephemeris server... and now by Celestia!

[ElPelado]

Thank you Selden!

4) Highly precise formulas for calculating the positions of the planets and moons of the solar system. They are more accurate than VSOP-87 and much better than simple Keplerian orbits. They are used by the Horizons ephemeris server... and now by Celestia!

The 1.3.2 pre already comes with it? Or we have to download them?

[selden]

My understanding is that their databases are extremely large, and Chris may still be debugging them, so they aren't included with the prerelease. Hopefully he'll publicise them and make them available on SourceForge when they're ready. I'd expect they could be made available separately, perhaps sooner than the "final" release of 1.3.2.