chris wrote:I personally think that the current scheme strikes a nice balance between too few and too many files. But since Grant has been handling most of the updates to the data files, I'm inclined to let him choose the organization that he prefers.
Shrug. As more of a "maintainer" than a "developer" these days, I'll work within whatever format active developers would prefer.
I can understand that people who rarely examine the text of the distribution
ssc's, looking for particular objects, would be happy with fewer files to keep track of; but those of us who need to access and modify the objects frequently like to have them sorted into separate, smaller files.
Like Chris, I think the current scheme is reasonably well balanced.
The only comment I have is that the definitions of solar sytem moons are rather clunkily distributed between
solarsys.ssc,
minormoons.ssc and
numberedmoons.ssc. The only reason to continue with this scheme is to retain compatibility across versions (which is of course a reason well worth considering).
But I think, if it didn't cause carnage for users, I'd prefer to see the moons packed into two files, both in the \data folder:
solarsys.ssc and some other file, name to be determined. In
solarsys.ssc, I'd keep all the regular satellites, listed in order of their distance from the planet; in the other file I'd place the outer irregulars of the giant planets. This would make Solar System Browser a little more intuitive, since the inner minor regular satellites would be positioned closer to the parent planet than they currently are, and minor regulars in trojan orbits could be placed appropriately next to their governing satellite.
Grant