Malenfant wrote:t00fri wrote:Anybody thought about the resources this takes away from Celestia's MAIN task: rendering the universe in 3d and exceptional precision...
I think that's a spurious argument if you consider that in all probability people do other things while using Celestia. e.g. I usually have a web browser in the background and an mp3 player playing some music, maybe an email client too or Word or Excel - all of these are supposedly 'taking away resources' from Celestia, but it still manages just fine.
Right of course, but this fact can hardly be promoted into a design criterion . The strategy will always remain to optimize the Celestia perfomance by itself (i.e. irrespective of people looking at what those Russian bots in the forum have to offer as "background entertainment" )
Also many applications like e.g. email load the system very little , since writing an email takes a (comparatively) long time and sending it is done quickly. Playing MP3 music is a continuous load, though...To have some narrator tell stories is presumably also a fairly economical affair in comparison to playing high bandwidth music.
I agree, of course that sound would be fine. It's just a matter of compromise and the price may be quite high.The capability to play sound in Celestia would be great and very useful, especially for educational narrations - and to be honest I think education is Celestia's main task.
I can still see a number of other attractive purposes of Celestia besides education. Since I am kind of "educated" already, I would be bored with it otherwise
While I think you have a point here, I would not go as far as saying that the overall precision of Celestia is far from outstanding. There are many aspects that I can judge very well and that are extremely impressive, indeed. The rest is hopefully to come soon, given that Chris is kind of "reactivated"When it comes to "rendering the universe in 3D and exceptional precision" Celestia is really far from this goal at the moment - it doesn't even render planets with the realistic photometric functions and its multiple lighting algorithm is currently extremely flawed and so far these do not seem to be on the table for fixing, and nobody has even bothered to comment on these issues when I raised them.
Your galaxies and binary stars are excellent and very useful add-ons and certainly allow for a more fully rendered universe, but there are other important areas that are still badly flawed when it comes to realistically rendering the universe.
Agreed. But let's see how we'll be doing in that respect in the near-future...Like I am really looking forward to a complete overhaul of the planetary atmosphere code, that --I know--is high up on Chris' todo list!
Bye Fridger