Celestia's lack of Fine Controls

[mikemoog]

Celestia is, of course, truly inspired and deeply inspiring. Yet I cannot help noting that most upgrades and discussions centre on additions such as 'deep sky objects' and rendering enhancements, while certain basic functional controls remain rudimentary or simply not provided.

Giving the scaling of distance and time in the program (ie. in the Cosmos!) the lack of 'fine controls' make it difficult (often impossible) to view certain scenarios, occlusions, and other 'events'.
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I offer the following in particular as perhaps worth considering:

1. 'Fine adjustment' to the passage of time and spatial orientation. Some simple 'keyboard modifiers' would help immensely. [Currently, 10x skips time from 'comatose' to 'ludicrous speed', whilst Shift-Arrow swings the viewpoint too rapidly]

2. Better management of objects to Track, Follow, Chase and Sync.. As it is, this feature is very ungainly with the 'current object' simply over-riding the 'previous object'. A list of 'recent objects' that could be independently assigned would allow some flexibility.
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Also 'missing in action' or possible fixes

3. Previously, heading (when 'travelling') was decoupled from camera-view, whereas now one always heads where the camera is looking. So, travelling 'sideways' is a feature that seems to have been removed! Is this true? Don't remove features! That's mad!

4. After dragging with both mouse buttons down, the final view always seems to 'skip' no matter how or in which order the buttons are released. Glitch or bug?

5. A 'tablet' driver would be nice.
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I may have overlooked features that are actually present, but any suggestions or discussion would be welcome.
Mike

[rra]

Mike , I agree with your first point , Celestia's time control
could have smaller time-steps, for instance 1-3-10 X increments.
You could also try the LUA tools build around Celestia,
here you have other (extra) user-interface with fine-tuned time-steps for instance.
I can't find the links right now, just search for LUA (or Vincent for that matter) in the forum .


Ren?©

[Vincent]

Here's a link to the Lua Edu Tools :
http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php ... c&start=24

[fsgregs]

Mikemoog:

whilst Shift-Arrow swings the viewpoint too rapidly

You can currently adjust the speed at which your viewpoint swings when you press the arrow keys. To do so, open the celestia.cfg file which resides in the main Celestia folder, using Wordpad or any text editor. Locate the line that says, "RotateAcceleration 120.0". Change it to read, "RotateAcceleration 40.0". Your rotation rate will slow down by 2/3. Save the file and relaunch Celestia.

Enjoy

Frank

[LordFerret]

"3. Previously, heading (when 'travelling') was decoupled from camera-view, whereas now one always heads where the camera is looking. So, travelling 'sideways' is a feature that seems to have been removed! Is this true? Don't remove features! That's mad!" - mikemoog

While in free-flight, this is something I too have wished was possible.