PlutonianEmpire wrote:You mean, NASA is actually gonna use celestia?
Like I said we are "evaluating" the use of Celestia. In some ways I feel uncomfortable talking about work and NASA, but I'm a taxpayer too--I'll try to water things down so as to stay out of trouble.
As a sw developer, I see no reason to invent the wheel--reuse of good source code makes sense. The space flight community is already using many open source applications to improve capabilities--heck nearly all of the mission control and flight design computers are going over to Red Hat Linux. For a long time, we (the space flight community) had to develop our own tools for things like plotting, gui builders, file transfer, scripting languages, databases, etc... Thankfully now we can get to work more on doing spaceflight and not have to reinvent the wheel. Like it or not, open source software (OSS) is making huge in-roads @ NASA. I think we use more OSS than we realize.
My personal hope is that we can give back to the open source community and contribute--I don't know if that will happen though. Everyone always asks what the space program does for them. This could be a way for NASA to make substantial contributions, get the job done, and save money in the process. Right now I'm not ready to touch this hot potato any more.
Paolo wrote:Another thing that was requested from so long time and that should be used by astronautical (but not only) simulations is the real 3D landscapes based upon height maps (bump maps/normal maps) associated to VT images.
Yes this would be great! There are already many data formats used by USGS and NASA for terrain topo mapping and images. The key would be to pick the best format--there are many, many formats and this would take a great design choice. Trust me on this, we tried integtrating lunar south pole image and terrain data into STK and while successfull, it was not easy. This is a huge topic and an excellent design choice is critical.
Paolo wrote:I think that the Fridger's idea of considering Celestia as a Framework tool to build upon different applications should be discussed extensively, in order to integrate in this framework all the new interesting capabilities (sound, infotext, net, stellar motion) that are going to be discussed now.
Yes, yes, yes. I think with a mininum of trouble, the core graphics engine and capablilities of Celestia could be used in other tools. I've been poking around the code and the overall design and quality is excellent. It's already subdivided into libraries, I just need to spend more time looking at the code and seeing how the various front ends are integrated. I feel it would be a good design goal to take the core capabilities and make them into a framework that could link or be used with other tools.
I wrote Celestia matters NOT CelestialMatters, meaning that I have worked on code and other things for Celestia.
. He meant he was working on "matters to do with Celestia" - not on the "CelestialMatters website" as tech2000 thought.
