Full-time on Celestia!

[hank]

As far as I understand, Christophe T. is tacitly working since some time (i.e. after our last respective discussion) on porting the Qt3 GUI from the KDE version to Qt4 which then should compile (in principle ;-) ) under Windows...

It's been a while since Christophe reported on his progress. I'd be interested to hear how it's going. I downloaded Qt4 for Mac OS X, but my attempt to install it was unsuccessful (probably because I don't have the latest version of the OS and developer tools). I don't know if anyone is actively looking at wxWindows or any other alternatives. Qt4 probably has the edge because it could make use of the existing KDE Celestia UI. But there may be other factors to consider. Personally, I'm mostly interested in the possibilities of an extensible Lua-based GUI, which could be built on top of whichever C++ toolkit is adopted.

- Hank

[Christophe]

I haven't had time to work on it in June, but I should be able to spend some time on it before I leave for Japan at the end of the month. Hopefuly it will build on Linux by then.

Here is what has been done:
- basic CMake build system. It can build the GLUT version but there is still a lot to be done to automate lib detection.
- conversion of about half the files in the kde directory from KDE3 to KDE4 (the main one kdeapp.cpp is done).
- conversion of .ui files to Qt4

Once the conversion to KDE4 is done, there will probably be some debuging to do, the i18n will also have to be adjusted. Then we will look into getting it to work on Windows. This will probably have to wait until September as I'm coming back from Japan in late August.

[t00fri]

before I leave for Japan at the end of the month.
...
This will probably have to wait until September as I'm coming back from Japan in late August.

Ah, Christophe,

where will you be based in Japan? In August the "rain season" is JUST over around Mt Fuji,



so you can climb it, sleep on top, watch the sunrise and enjoy marvelous views! It's a long hike (3800 m altitude) but it's not very hard. You could even start at 2500 m if you are in a hurry. Then you just got 1300 m to do in one day.

I will be in Mexico in November. They also got a "nice one"




Cheers,
Fridger

[dirkpitt]

It's a long hike (3800 m altitude) but it's not very hard. You could even start at 2500 m if you are in a hury. Then you just got 1300 m to do in one day.

Actually due to the slippery volcanic dust, ascending Mt Fuji turned out to be quite tiring for me.. the descent was very fast though, since after some practice I could use the slipperiness to my advantage and sort of slide/run downhill. Make sure you take the trip around the crater so as not to miss the "real" summit.

[t00fri]

It's a long hike (3800 m altitude) but it's not very hard. You could even start at 2500 m if you are in a hury. Then you just got 1300 m to do in one day.

Actually due to the slippery volcanic dust, ascending Mt Fuji turned out to be quite tiring for me.. the descent was very fast though, since after some practice I could use the slipperiness to my advantage and sort of slide/run downhill. Make sure you take the trip around the crater so as not to miss the "real" summit.

I was about to write about this, too. Notably in the upper part, it was tiring due to the loose vulcanic sand. Sort of like "one step upward, half a step backward" ...On the way down we took those steep sand "couloirs", riding on our hiking sticks like witches do (one uses the sticks between the legs for steering and breaking!). The downhill speed can become quite high and we were /later/ told by Japanese friends that serious accidents are not unfrequent this way...My wife fell once during this descent, and for many years was left with a black vulcanic sand grain under her forehead skin . Our shoes were unusable thereafter also due to the sharp sand.

This "sand experience" seems to be quite generic for vulcanos near the summit. We experienced it too, when ascending the (active) 2900 m Gunung Merapi vulcano through the dense jungle near Bukitingi/Sumatra and also Mt Bromo in Java.

Cheers,
Fridger

[ElChristou]

Was the title of this thread "Full time on Celestia" or was it a typo and one should read "Full time out of Celestia"?

(Soorry Chris, I'm sure you cannot do more than what you actually do, but couldn't resist, 3 posts in almost half a month makes me think this title was really funny! )

[t00fri]

Was the title of this thread "Full time on Celestia" or was it a typo and one should read "Full time out of Celestia"?

(Soorry Chris, I'm sure you cannot do more than what you actually do, but couldn't resist, 3 posts in almost half a month makes me think this title was really funny! )

Remember I told you about a "second reason"

Cheers,
Fridger

[ElChristou]

...Remember I told you about a "second reason"

Yeah, yeah...

Hey Chris, what about a rest (could be with a bit of coding of course ), just to regenerate strengths?

[t00fri]

Soon it will be two full months since Chris announced his "retirement from NVIDIA" and "full-time=50+5 hours/week" work on Celestia . His last post was on July 10 and before that he wrote only about 1 post/week since his announcement in June.

Yesterday, I returned from our great 3 weeks annual hiking vacation in the high mountains of the Engadin/Switzerland...

So I ask myself what we are waiting for? .

Will Chris ever be back? Does anybody have more concise information about his whereabouts? Since Chris is still "in command", further Celestia development necessarily stagnates for an undefined time, just as we had it not so long ago for about one year.

Any good ideas?

Bye Fridger

[Fightspit]

I just checked in Sourceforge in the mailing list but he hasn't done a post since mid July... So, any news of him ?

[ajtribick]

Can a new release be made without Chris? What are the outstanding issues with v1.5.0, and is Chris needed to get them fixed?

Might it be better to assume that Chris has abandoned the project, get some releases out, otherwise this project will just lose all its developers because there's no point if it doesn't get released.

[selden]

Hopefully "abandoned" is overstating things. I suspect something unexpected happened which has been occupying his time.

As for things that need to be done, there is a partial list of outstanding bugs on SourceForge plus the items listed in the "roadmap" posting.

[ElChristou]

Soon it will be two full months since Chris announced his "retirement from NVIDIA" and "full-time=50+5 hours/week" work on Celestia . His last post was on July 10 and before that he wrote only about 1 post/week since his announcement in June...

Indeed, I begin to believe that Celestia is for Chris only a platform to test some new stuff he learns from time to time, from a coding and OGL point of view, nothing less, nothing more...

I'm wondering why you devs are still following Celestia, I mean, ok we all love the beauty of this soft, but really seems we are all also quite masochist... ...or I'm wrong?

[t00fri]

I definitely don't think Chis would want to abandon Celestia at this time. Celestia is really important for him. This I know for sure. I also know of a pretty important reason for his distraction from Celestia.

What I don't know is whether Chris is in Seattle or whether he is at some other place of this globe, possibly climbing etc. Theoretically he might even have had an accident...

It seems -- and this is really unusual-- that this time he did not tell anyone from the Celestia community about his whereabouts. He simply has vanished.

Actually, I do have an agreement with Chris (still from the time of his last disappearance and in exchange of Celestia-FT-1.x ) that I am free to go on submitting code to CVS, should he disappear again for an extended period...

However, this time, I am pretty busy preparing and coding for my OWN cosmological visualization project that will eventually be realized separately from Celestia via SF. The "take-off" is mainly delayed by my little available time, so far.

Also I am actively coding new features for my new forthcoming txtools...

So I suppose, one day Chris will reappear and try to put 1.5.0pre4 together within a day or two

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

Fridger,

there's one thing that urgently needs to be updated, with Celedtia : the stars database. As I've shown some time ago, there are many doubles and many inconsistencies with the greek naming scheme. And many stars don't even have a spectral class.

[ElChristou]

I definitely don't think Chis would want to abandon Celestia at this time. Celestia is really important for him. This I know for sure. I also know of a pretty important reason for his distraction from Celestia...

Whatever the distraction is, one you don't say publicly you will work full time on a project then disappear the next day (or else you take people for idiots), two, if you take a rest, at least a quick word before living is the minimum a civilized (/educated) person would do...

[t00fri]

Fridger,

there's one thing that urgently needs to be updated, with Celedtia : the stars database. As I've shown some time ago, there are many doubles and many inconsistencies with the greek naming scheme. And many stars don't even have a spectral class.

Martin,

I will NOT significantly address stars.txt and its correction file revised.stc until we have all agreed to a procedure for (documented) corrections that I can accept. See my long plea and discussions with Chris and Grant in my recent thread 'stars.txt'

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... =stars+txt

I largely have cleaned my double star data base (visualbins.stc and spectbins.stc) concerning double entries, greek lettering etc. But from my part that will be it.

I will also have a look if the apparent lack of spectral classes is related to parse errors in the code. If so this can easily be corrected for 1.5.0final. Yet the merging of spectral classes from supplementary catalogs is a big and tedious project, which I shall NOT address before stars.txt + revised.stc have a "clean" strategical basis.

Bye Fridger

[fsgregs]

Since space is full of millions of stars, I really urge everyone to use either the 1 million or 2 million stars.dat file that is available for Celestia as a starting database file. The small 100,000 stars.dat file available in the default app is simply too small. When I use the 1 million dat file, space is beautifully filled with stars, particularly when using automag.

[t00fri]

Since space is full of millions of stars, I really urge everyone to use either the 1 million or 2 million stars.dat file that is available for Celestia as a starting database file. The small 100,000 stars.dat file available in the default app is simply too small. When I use the 1 million dat file, space is beautifully filled with stars, particularly when using automag.

Yes, but their position (distance) is largely phantasy and that is not part of Celestia's plot.

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

Fridger,

you and Grant have all authority on the star catalogue. Both of you should define the procedure for the corrections. Chris is more important for the code, and he abandonned Celestia once again anyway, so I suggest that you and Grant proceed without asking him.