Stopclock function in Celestia?

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

One thing I find myself hankering for at the moment is a 'stopclock function' in Celestia. By this I mean that you press a button to start a clock from:
00 00:00:00 (days hours:minutes:seconds) which runs in Celestia time until you press another button that stops it.

This would be handy for timing things like seeing how long it takes between sunrise and sunset on any given planet at a location on its surface. (yes, I know you can just figure it out from the existing clock, but it's more awkward that way ).

Does anything like this exist? (can it be done as a script?) If not, can it be added at all??

[Sky Pilot]

Oooh, I really like that suggestion. It would also make it easier to calculate how long it would take to get from point A to point B at different speeds. Nice idea!

[hank]

One thing I find myself hankering for at the moment is a 'stopclock function' in Celestia. By this I mean that you press a button to start a clock from:
00 00:00:00 (days hours:minutes:seconds) which runs in Celestia time until you press another button that stops it.

This would be handy for timing things like seeing how long it takes between sunrise and sunset on any given planet at a location on its surface. (yes, I know you can just figure it out from the existing clock, but it's more awkward that way ;)).

Does anything like this exist? (can it be done as a script?) If not, can it be added at all??

This would be easy to do with a Lua script.

- Hank

[Harry]

This would be easy to do with a Lua script.

Yes, indeed. Look at this thread at the Motherlode forum - this happened while shatters.net was down.

Harald

[hank]

On that Motherlode thread I saw this:

You probably already know that I simply HATE the LUA language, but this really IS a useful script.

What's not to like about Lua? It's very simple yet very powerful (as this example illustrates).

- Hank

[Bob Hegwood]

What's not to like about Lua? It's very simple yet very powerful (as this example illustrates).

Sorry, but it ain't simple to me...

As you probably know, I'm the Brain-Dead user of Celestia,
so I tend NOT to understand some things which are easily
grasped by you well-educated types.

LUA just doesn't make sense to me. I need a language which
starts at point A, and which ends at point B, with logical
steps in between. Try as I might, I just don't GET the LUA
language.

Take care, Bob

[maxim]

Bob,

if you use some of the existing lua scripts as example, you will surely find them very procedural (programlike -> not very linear). But you should be able to build celx scripts nearly in the same way as you build cel scripts. Most cel commands have a representation in celx. So if you just write them from start to end, they should work like cel scripts. Some time later you might have some idea of doing something more complicated that doesn't work in cel - like a loop or using a variable for some repetitive value (the default wait time for example) - and that's simple to solve in celx/lua. Et voil?, after some time and a quite flat learning curve you suddenly are a lua expert and will easily write the most complicated scripts.

maxim

[Bob Hegwood]

Thanks for the confidence Maxim, but I think you're over-
estimating the capabilties of my damaged brain.

LUA is an object-oriented language, yes? Have never been
able to grasp this stuff. Don't know why...

I will give it some more time though. You never know, I might
just need a brewsky before I try to understand the stuff.

Thanks, Bob