In addition to other approaches, maybe a message should be displayed the first time Stellarium is run (i.e. if a new config file has to be made), which tells the user they should set their location and timezone, and how to do it?
I'm not 100% sure it's a good idea - first time run wizards tend to annoy me, but maybe its worthwhile. I'd be interested to know what people think of this.
Matthew
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Some bugs are fixed, for instance the observer location bug mentioned in a previous thread ("Apollo landing sites") or the Saturn bug (watching Saturn ring from Saturn moons).
There are also some new features like the minimum_fps feature (by nuisence or Tim) and telescope control (see the wiki).
Anyway there has not been much time for developing great features since version 0.8.0.
Johannes
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I'm inclined to agree. One of the biggest bugs is that when I change my location - say to Greenwich in the UK, the sun sets at 5.13am at the moment which is silly. That's because the application retains my computer time which is set to Adelaide, which is (plus) 9.5h ahead of GMT. Yes, I know I can change my computer location to GMT (UTC) but really, this shouldn't be necessary. Unless this bug is corrected, a serious flaw exists. At the moment, Stellarium works correctly -only- at the user's computer time setting location. Please comment on this, Stellarium people. :-)
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Well it's true. Ths is not a bug but a boring behaviour. The problem is that making a portable code which returns you the correct time zone for a given earth position is not so trivial...
If one of you knows how to do that, please let us know!
Fabien
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the space in the title bar is limited. Currently the stellariums time expressed in the format of the computers local time is displayed. I agree that in order to avoid confusion - like you are suffering from - a time zone description like UTC+9.5 could be appended. Yet this is not a bug but a feature request.
Yours,
Johannes
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Detecting the timezone from geographic location is not trivial. You need a very detailed political map of the earth, because timezone boundaries follow state boundaries. Plus some database of political decisions about daylight saving time. This information must be kept up to date when political decisions in any part of the world change the timezone rules.
In my opinion this process is error prone and you are bound to get user complaints. In any case you would have to give the user the possibility to overrule the automagic detection.
Perhaps an alternative could be to show true solar time, but I suppose that nobody is interested in that.
I favorize a simple timezone description in the titlebar, then no misunderstanding can happen.
Johannes
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I've downloaded and installed version 0.8.1, thereby
replacing 0.8.0.
Insofar as fixing bugs, I can't see any difference.
Perhaps someone can explain what the difference is.
In addition to other approaches, maybe a message should be displayed the first time Stellarium is run (i.e. if a new config file has to be made), which tells the user they should set their location and timezone, and how to do it?
I'm not 100% sure it's a good idea - first time run wizards tend to annoy me, but maybe its worthwhile. I'd be interested to know what people think of this.
Matthew
Just some examples:
Some bugs are fixed, for instance the observer location bug mentioned in a previous thread ("Apollo landing sites") or the Saturn bug (watching Saturn ring from Saturn moons).
There are also some new features like the minimum_fps feature (by nuisence or Tim) and telescope control (see the wiki).
Anyway there has not been much time for developing great features since version 0.8.0.
Johannes
I'm inclined to agree. One of the biggest bugs is that when I change my location - say to Greenwich in the UK, the sun sets at 5.13am at the moment which is silly. That's because the application retains my computer time which is set to Adelaide, which is (plus) 9.5h ahead of GMT. Yes, I know I can change my computer location to GMT (UTC) but really, this shouldn't be necessary. Unless this bug is corrected, a serious flaw exists. At the moment, Stellarium works correctly -only- at the user's computer time setting location. Please comment on this, Stellarium people. :-)
Well it's true. Ths is not a bug but a boring behaviour. The problem is that making a portable code which returns you the correct time zone for a given earth position is not so trivial...
If one of you knows how to do that, please let us know!
Fabien
Taking the difference between local time and UTC is a reasonable choice due to its simplicity.
I remember a VB project where we got the UTC time from the DB via SQL statements because VB does not support UTC and timezones... %~/
Apparently, the competition (celestia) uses system dependant code for this (at least the UI stuff).
To avoid this, you could include the UNIX TZ info
and the functions into stellarium's code.
Make sure to modify the variable type time_t in such a way that you can avoid the year 2038 problem.
Dear Mervo1944,
the space in the title bar is limited. Currently the stellariums time expressed in the format of the computers local time is displayed. I agree that in order to avoid confusion - like you are suffering from - a time zone description like UTC+9.5 could be appended. Yet this is not a bug but a feature request.
Yours,
Johannes
Detecting the timezone from geographic location is not trivial. You need a very detailed political map of the earth, because timezone boundaries follow state boundaries. Plus some database of political decisions about daylight saving time. This information must be kept up to date when political decisions in any part of the world change the timezone rules.
In my opinion this process is error prone and you are bound to get user complaints. In any case you would have to give the user the possibility to overrule the automagic detection.
Perhaps an alternative could be to show true solar time, but I suppose that nobody is interested in that.
I favorize a simple timezone description in the titlebar, then no misunderstanding can happen.
Johannes