a few more suggested features

[billybob884]

what about shift 1 and 2?

[Dnumdé]

I have a few suggestions...

For objects that are animated, like a fictional space station that has rotating parts or stretching parts, there should be an option that allows continuous mesh animation. Say that you make an animation with 6 meshes: Celestia could load all and display them in time increments that you can specify in a .ssc file.

I also think that multiple textures should be supported for one object at one time. There are some detailed meshes I have downloaded (like Star Trek ships, etc.) and they come with several textures...I just think it would make my life (and probably the lives many others who have no great skill in 3D Studio) a lot easier if Celestia supported something like that. I don't know how much code it would require though...

EDIT: The post below is mine also, but I don't remember logging out.

[Guest]

I have another one:

On the information display (I don't know the term for it), it could display a little bit of history about the time that you are in. There could be a data file for ranges saying things such as "Apollo 11 lands on the Moon" or "At approximately this time period the asteroid Chicxulub hits the Earth". Of course they could be disabled for people who don't like too much information on the screen, but I would like such an addition. If there are plenty of facts for one specific date, it would show one and you could press a button to show the next fact. I don't think that would be too hard to program.

It could be a data file of some sort that you can edit, add, or subtract from. I think it would be enjoyable to travel through space and learn something about the time you are traveling in.

[billybob884]

As for # 2, the planet grid thing, I've made the grid with an accented equator, prime miredian, the arctic & anarctic circles, and both tropics. It's in .bmp format, because when I converted it to .jpg it got reamms messy and didn't show up clear. you can download it here: http://mikecelestia.web1000.com/planetgrid.zip. what really suprises me is that winzip could pack a 6mb file to barely 30kb

[selden]

Mike,

A .BMP file is completely uncompressed. When you have one with large areas containing exactly the same data (like the white squares of your grid) then compression programs like zip can really squish it down.

When I used ImageMagick's display program to convert your .BMP to JPEG format, the result looked fine to me. ImageMagick is freeware, so you should consider adding it to your toolchest if you don't already have it.

The units you used for the grid are slightly unconventional. I think it'd be useful if you could also create one with 10 degree markings (36x18 instead of 24x12). And then add numeric annotations and tic marks for finer measurements

A .png version with an alpha channel (transparent where you have white now) would also be quite useful, I think. Then it could replace a cloud texture, for example, and one could overlay the grid on top of a planetary map texture.

Thanks!

[billybob884]

hey, i put it into .png format and it works great! thanks a lot!

[billybob884]

11) How about instead of making just a flat thing for the rings, make a 3ds model of a whole bunch of particles. It could be set up so it would orbit the sun at the same distance, eccentricity, speed, position, ect as the desired planet, making it spin aswell. you could give certain rows of particles different colors to look likew the rings do from a difference.

12) This one should only be included if the above one is. make an option to switch from the current rings to the ones I suggested above and then back.