Mitaka Version 1.0 was released

[t00fri]

As for things it (Mitaka) doesn't do: extrasolar planets
...
--Chris

I disagree. A long list of exoplanet data is in the 'data' directory... . OK SPIRES is still missing

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

Here are some impressions of Mitaka in "Cosmo" mode that I would have loved to see also in Celestia...

But is this a model or you can pick a point and see the object?
What about FPS at this level?

It would be cool to have in Celestia another Galaxy catalogue for all uncertain objects (a sub class of the galaxy class?), only rendered by a point. We could have this way such rendering...

[t00fri]

Here are some impressions of Mitaka in "Cosmo" mode that I would have loved to see also in Celestia...

But is this a model or you can pick a point and see the object?
What about FPS at this level?

right now (in this default version), the SDSS data are presumably represented just by dots without all the rich data base info that we have about these SDSS galaxies.

It would be cool to have in Celestia another Galaxy catalogue for all uncertain objects (a sub class of the galaxy class?), only rendered by a point. We could have this way such rendering...

I doubt that this would be very valuable, since it may give rise to incorrect impressions in case of not so knowledgable users...

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Beautiful /real 3d/ topography displays on Mars at low altitude! Way better and more elegant than in Celestia...

Here is a flavor. The fps rates are surprisingly high.
One may modify the amount of topographical exaggeration on the fly




Bye Fridger

[danielj]

No problems.When I buy a dual or quad core in 2009,I will test Mitaka.Before this,is impossible...
What is your system right now,Fridger?If I remember well,you have 3 gig of RAM and this prevents programs to have to much stutter up...

...
Mitaka does some things better than Celestia, others not
as well. The galaxy rendering is beautiful, with very nice
spiral arms and dust lanes. It appears to be accomplished
with a ray casting algorithm. As for things it doesn't do:
extrasolar planets, binary stars, extensibility through
add-ons, SPICE interface, fast rendering of complex
models, ring shadows. This isn't intended as criticism of
Mitaka; I'm just pointing out the some of the different
focuses of the two programs.

Mitaka is still very young compared to Celestia.


I had no chance looking into the sources (MIT licence)
yet and the manual is in Japanese. So it's hard to asses
implementation aspects in depth at this point. But there
are many signs that I could make out that clearly point
towards a VERY well done general framework.


However, I noticed that their detailed galaxy rendering
also has its price. On my core-2-duo the framerates get
quite slow near galaxies (DirectX 9.0c) . Also wait until
they got 10000 at a time! Right now there is only
essentially some rendering of the local group.


There is however already rendering of the Oort cloud and
trans-neptunian Objects in general.

Here, there's no real magic in Mitaka . . . There are a few
minor modifications one could make to Celestia to
accomplish the same thing. The large scale structure data
could be rendered as a point sprite cmod in Celestia.

I think "minor modifications" would be a loosing strategy
in this respect...

Hardly the case . . . Mitaka doesn't do any of these
things. Anyhow, someone should get busy producing a
cmod of the 'Large Scale Structure of the Universe' data
set.

Would again be a short-sighted loosing effort.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

No problems.When I buy a dual or quad core in 2009,I will test Mitaka.Before this,is impossible...
What is your system right now,Fridger?If I remember well,you have 3 gig of RAM and this prevents programs to have to much stutter up...

My system that I presently use for testing Mitaka is a NOTEBOOK with 2 Gb of Ram, a 2GHz core-2-duo CPU and a lower range NVIDIA FX 7300 card/256MB. On this not so fancy machine, the displays are VERY smooth.

You should meanwhile have learned that for such programs it's the performance of the graphics card (GPU +card memory) that counts most and NOT the CPU + its memory.

As you can read on the Mitaka site, the requirements for acceptable displays are MUCH lower:

Code: Select all

OS   Windows XP/2000(*)
CPU   Pentium4 1.8GHz or better
RAM   512MB or more
Graphics Adapter   GeForce 3 or better
Display Resolution   1024x768 pixels or more
Hard Disk Space   50MB or more


So your present system is in all respects by far good enough for using Mitaka.

Bye Fridger

[bh]

Won't even start on wifes machine... Vista, 1Gb ram.

[selden]

bh,

The Web page says Mitaka only works under Windows XP and Windows 2000. There's no mention of Vista.

Another confusion factor: under Windows 2000 it says it needs at least DirectX 8.1 or later but under the discussion of screengrabs, it says it needs the OpenGL function "pBuffer" to save images with arbitrary sizes. Maybe it uses both types of graphics libraries?

(I've often wanted to generate extremely high resolution images from Celestia...)

[t00fri]

Won't even start on wifes machine... Vista, 1Gb ram.

But Vista with just 1 GB seems like a real "email-only" affair

Bye Fridger

[selden]

bh,

On one of the Web pages it suggests trying mitaka_VC.exe if mitaka.exe doesn't work. It's in the same directory. I haven't found anything describing the differences, although the file is smaller.

Did you try that?

Both seem to work fine on my XP system.

[bh]

Thanks Selden... no luck there either.

[ElChristou]

Beautiful /real 3d/ topography displays on Mars at low altitude! Way better and more elegant than in Celestia...

Here is a flavor. The fps rates are surprisingly high.
One may modify the amount of topographical exaggeration on the fly

On the fly is quite incredible...

[t00fri]

Did anyone find out (using his/her best Japanese ) how to select individual objects (besides the ones that are listed explicitly in the menues) ?? Apparently navigation is meant to be delegated to the Mitaka Navigator, the English version of which is announced but is not quite yet available.

Notably, if you use fullscreen display (ALT+Enter) then you can conveniently change the settings via the overlay menue that is started by hitting the x key. The selection of the overlay entries proceeds via the up/down keys. Hitting the X key repeatedly on entries with a > lets you dive further down the tree structure of the menue. Analogously hitting the Z key repeatedly lets you move up in the hierarchy.

Bye Fridger

[Edit]:

Here is a translated table of operations:

Mouse Operations

Code: Select all

Drag with left button down   Change the view direction.
Drag with right button down, or wheeling   Zoom in/out (space mode). Change the viewing angle (planetarium mode).
Double click (left button)   Move to the double-clicked point on a planet's surface.
Click + button in the upper-right corner   Move time forward.
Click - button on the upper-right corner   Move time backward.
Right-click in the upper-right corner   Open pop-up menu for time handling.
Click + button in the lower-right corner   Zoom out.
Click - button in the lower-right corner   Zoom in.
Right-click in the lower-right corner   Open pop-up menu for scale selection.
Push the wheel button   Land or take off a planet.


Keyboard Operations

Code: Select all

Arrow   Change the view direction.
1 + Arrow   Slue the view (only for the space mode).
Page Up   Zoom in.
Page Down   Zoom out.
4   Move time forward
3   Move time backward
Z + 4   Increase the time step (up to 100 years).
Z + 3   Increase the time step (down to 10 seconds).
S   Land or take off from a planet.
X   Open a menu on screen. (X and Z navigate the menu).
A   Show or hide labels.
F   Show or hide frame rate per second.



[chris]

As for things it (Mitaka) doesn't do: extrasolar planets
...
--Chris

I disagree. A long list of exoplanet data is in the 'data' directory... . OK SPIRES is still missing

Bye Fridger

Also missing is any sort of orbital data. There's just a list of planet names with the HIPPARCOS ids of the stars they orbit. The only thing that you can do with exoplanets is to highlight the stars that host them.

--Chris

[t00fri]

Click on the movies (flash player) on this side. You'll see some typical and quite "appetizing" displays from the forthcoming N body simulator

http://4d2u.nao.ac.jp/topH.html

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

As for things it (Mitaka) doesn't do: extrasolar planets
...
--Chris

I disagree. A long list of exoplanet data is in the 'data' directory... . OK SPIRES is still missing

Bye Fridger

Also missing is any sort of orbital data. There's just a list of planet names with the HIPPARCOS ids of the stars they orbit. The only thing that you can do with exoplanets is to highlight the stars that host them.

--Chris

Yes, I know. What was possible about Exoplanets at the times of Celestia 1.1 ? . Do you really think that within another year or so, they won't be able to implement also orbits for exos and the various other features that you emphasized earlier in favor of Celestia?

At least one can also mark binary stars NOW which I find useful.


I just can't help seeing a LOT of potential in the design of Mitaka.

Also given the present high quality of numerous graphical features, the coding is certainly done at an elevated level.


Obvously, the sponsoring of Mitaka's development is done with operation of planetariums in mind. Hence for me an important question is how accurate the astromechanics is actually implemented. For planetarium performances alone , not too much seems to be needed.
But in their mission statement, they are considerably more ambitious:

Mitaka is software for visualizing theoretical, computational, and observational astronomical data,

Bye Fridger

[chris]

bh,

The Web page says Mitaka only works under Windows XP and Windows 2000. There's no mention of Vista.

Another confusion factor: under Windows 2000 it says it needs at least DirectX 8.1 or later but under the discussion of screengrabs, it says it needs the OpenGL function "pBuffer" to save images with arbitrary sizes. Maybe it uses both types of graphics libraries?

(I've often wanted to generate extremely high resolution images from Celestia...)

It's an OpenGL app. If your Vista machine is running Celestia ok, then Mitaka should also run.

--Chris

[danielj]

It??s interesting and different for Celestia.I can??t wait to see the English version of the manual.I know nothing about Japanese.But still after I download the earth_topo,the Earth is still in very low resolution.Is it a way to increase at least to medres?

As for things it (Mitaka) doesn't do: extrasolar planets
...
--Chris

I disagree. A long list of exoplanet data is in the 'data' directory... . OK SPIRES is still missing

Bye Fridger

Also missing is any sort of orbital data. There's just a list of planet names with the HIPPARCOS ids of the stars they orbit. The only thing that you can do with exoplanets is to highlight the stars that host them.

--Chris

Yes, I know. What was possible about Exoplanets at the times of Celestia 1.1 ? . Do you really think that within another year or so, they won't be able to implement also orbits for exos and the various other features that you emphasized earlier in favor of Celestia?

At least one can also mark binary stars NOW which I find useful.


I just can't help seeing a LOT of potential in the design of Mitaka.

Also given the present high quality of numerous graphical features, the coding is certainly done at an elevated level.


Obvously, the sponsoring of Mitaka's development is done with operation of planetariums in mind. Hence for me an important question is how accurate the astromechanics is actually implemented. For planetarium performances alone , not too much seems to be needed.
But in their mission statement, they are considerably more ambitious:

Mitaka is software for visualizing theoretical, computational, and observational astronomical data,

Bye Fridger

[chris]

Here are some impressions of Mitaka in "Cosmo" mode that I would have loved to see also in Celestia.

Well, here it is in Celestia. This is a point sprite cmod of the very same data set:



This is kind of neat. When viewed from Earth, you can see clearly the swath that was covered by the SDSS:



--Chris

[t00fri]

Here are some impressions of Mitaka in "Cosmo" mode that I would have loved to see also in Celestia.

Well, here it is in Celestia. This is a point sprite cmod of the very same data set:
...
--Chris

You used Selden's old add-on, I suppose.

OK Celestia is "Cosmo" . My dreams have come true...

Bye Fridger