New Feature - Display Start & End Times In View?

[BlindedByTheLight]

A lot of my addons only exist in certain time-frames (which I like and don't want to change in the SSC). However, it would be great if, in the object's details section in the upper-left hand corner, Celestia could list the object's start and end times. Maybe even along with a keyboard short-cut to automatically set Celestia to the object's start time - similar to a temporal "G" command (maybe make it shift-G).

And while I'm dreaming, break the dates down further and include the option to list several relavant dates in the SSC file (which would also be listed in the viewer's upper-left hand corner.

So Mir, for example, is normally declared like this:

"Mir" "Sol/Earth"
{
Class "spacecraft"
Radius 0.0165 # Mir is 33 meters long

Beginning 2446482.0 # Launched 20 Feb 1986
Ending 2451989.77083 # Reentered 21 Mar 2001
}

But, instead, we declare it like this:

"Mir" "Sol/Earth"
{
Class "spacecraft"
Radius 0.0165 # Mir is 33 meters long

Beginning 2446482.0 #Launched 20 Feb 1986
BeginningText "Launch Date"

Date1 24221234.412
Date1Text "Docked With Discovery"

Date2 2421444.00
Date2Text "Blew a large gasket"

Ending 2451989.77083 # Reentered 21 Mar 2001
EndingText "Re-Entered Atmosphere"
}

Celestia will calculate the real dates from the Julian dates and list it in the upper left-hand corner (along with the text tags included).

I think something like this would be great for some of the various space probes (for example, Deep Impact, which has several temporal points of interest).

Thoughts? Enhancements? Please-Stop-Filling-The-Boards-With-Nonsense, Steven's?

Steven

[maxim]

Wouldn't be too bad. I always hate it to open the scc and have a look at the times to set them correctly.

Wasn't there a FR about this some time ago?

maxim

[BlindedByTheLight]

Maybe there was... but I did a search for it and couldn't find nuthin'. If anyone finds it, please link it here... I'd be curious to read it.

[hjw]

Since I joined this board this has been discussed at least half a dozen times. I made some suggestions on (partially) solving this one, but nobody cared.
Sorry to say this, but there is nothing new on the development front. There seems to be no interest at all for tiny little probs like this.
And, most important: there is a workaround: read the ssc!

Horst.

[BlindedByTheLight]

Well, it seems that Maxim and I care... so that's two. Including you, we're up to three. Not exactly cause for celebration - but infinitely higher than "nobody".

I would be interested in the partial solutions you came up with. I searched your posts but could not find them. Do you remember the name of the posts? The only solution I have come up with is renaming the body to include the date so on can have it as a reference.

As for the workaround of reading the SSC, true, that works. But as Maxim pointed out, that is a lame substitute. Celestia creates a beautlful illusion of actually "being there"... it seems more than a shame to shatter that illusion by constantly having to jump out to a text file to pull up a date.

As for the developers not caring, I have been following the posts for some time and many of them do VERY much seem to care. The problems facing Celestia do not seem to be a lack of caring, just a lack of leadership - which, if Chris is to be taken at face value, is simply a function of real-world job needs rearing their ugly heads. A big "if" I know... but I'm keeping my fingers crossed...


EDITED:

I found one of the prior references to this issue:

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... ght=#41969

[Tosv]

Well, I??m also interested in this. I made a FR about it two weeks ago:

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7195

[hjw]

Well, the central idea was to dynamically create object-specific entries in the popup-menu that appears when you right-click an object. The info comes out of
ssc/dsc/etc files and let's you create additional sub-menus, activate cel-urls, cel-scripts, web-links, and the possibility to show/set exactly what you talked about.
Labels can be translated to other languages and so on...

Two technical problems:
- The KDE-GUI (which I use) can not dynamically create arbitrarily many new entries without some re-coding (this is also the reason why there is a limited amount
of alternate surfaces that can be addressed with the popup with KDE)
- If you are before or after all start/end-times you see no object to click on (therefore I wrote "partially"). But one could use some little DUMMY-object that
is displayed for such an object to get a clue that it is "there", just not at this time. Or
something other...

I actually implemented that stuff (may be one year ago), but I did a lot of things since then in other projects and I'm afraid it takes me longer to dig it
out than to re-code it.

Anyway, that was the short version. I'm not that good DESCRIBING things, I prefer coding /showing.

Horst.

[Brendan]

Maybe I could add something for such dates in BCelestia. I'll look at the code later to see how I could add it.

[hjw]

I wrote:

And, most important: there is a workaround: read the ssc!

Just in case: this was meant to be a joke

Horst.

[BlindedByTheLight]

I wrote:
Quote:
And, most important: there is a workaround: read the ssc!


Just in case: this was meant to be a joke

Horst.

Actually, glad you said that... I didn't take it as a joke (duh me)... but, on further inspection - it's a good one!

[BlindedByTheLight]

Hey there... so some enterprising coder has graciously actually created a patch that does most of what we were asking for... it shows a spacecrafts start and end time in the view AND hitting shift-G takes you there, not only in space, but also in time! VERY cool!

The link is here: http://www.gnacademy.org/twiki/bin/view ... Extensions

It does not yet allow for other important times (such as an add-on like Deep Impact has) but I think that is more than just coding, it would actually require new things to be declared in the SSC. Still, this thing is pretty awesome.