Now that I have done my xmas partying, I'll write about how I changed the source to get Celestia to reload files without needing to restart.
I took pieces of code out of celestiacore.cpp's initSimulation function and put them in several functions that each loaded different things. One loaded star and ssc files, one load dsc files and two more each loaded asterisms and boundaries. There is also a function that reloads all of those.
Each of them has a boolean value argument that is used to determine if celestia.cfg should be reloaded or not. If it is true, another function, loadConfig, is called to reload celestia.cfg.
The initSimulation function uses false for the arguments because it had already called loadConfig. There is code in winmain.cpp that calls these functions when the reload options in the file menu are selected. The argument true is used to cause celestia.cfg to be reloaded when those functions are called through the menu.
I toyed around with the parameters for a star. I made my K0 star into a O5 star and then a M9 supergiant without closing and reopening Celestia.
When I made it a T9 body thousands of light years away with a very negative magnitude, it wasn't drawn because it ended up being almost a million light years in radius. It engulfed the entire galaxy!
Celestia showed the surface temperature as 750 K and the temperatures calculated for the planets inside it was trillions and trillions K, as hot as the early universe.
Brendan
