Thread: [Celestia-developers] Hale Telescope Addon beta for Celestia
Real-time 3D visualization of space
Status: Beta
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From: <se...@le...> - 2007-12-19 14:21:28
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Gentle folk, A preliminary version of v2 of my Hale Telescope Addon for Celestia is available at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_v20b2.zip (~7.5MB, expands to ~35MB) If you would like to give it a try and tell me of any significant problems or mistakes, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've worked on it for so long that I don't know what's missing in the instructions, for example. I'm sure there are things I've overlooked in the modelling, too. All of my testing has been done under Windows XP. I'm hoping to make the final version publicly available this weekend, or certainly no later than Monday. I'm sorry for the rather late notice. It requires a recent pre-release version of Celestia v1.5.0 because of its use of ScriptedOrbits and reference frames, neither of which are available in Celestia v1.4.1. Thanks for whatever help you can provide. Selden |
From: Chris <elc...@ya...> - 2007-12-19 15:44:54
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Selden, could you please give us a basic sequence (in order) of what should be done? (Perso as I know nothing of the terminology of a telescope' structure it's not easy to choose between so many commands...) |
From: Selden E B. Jr <se...@le...> - 2007-12-19 16:14:10
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Chris, I'll create a picture from screengrabs showing the parts of the telescope, but I'm not sure when it'll be ready. This drawing of the Hale telescope by Russell Porter may help some: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/images/cutaway.jpg (500KB) Also, please take a look at these updates: http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/hale_telescope.html and http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_readme.txt They may help a little. I plan to work on them some more this evening for the b3 version, hopefully to be available tonight. s. Chris wrote > Selden, could you please give us a basic sequence (in order) of what > should be done? (Perso as I know nothing of the terminology of a > telescope' structure it's not easy to choose between so many > commands...) |
From: Chris L. <cl...@gm...> - 2007-12-19 19:21:14
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First of all: WOW! This is very impressive work (and a real torture test for scripted rotations and trajectories.) I have no trouble getting the different parts of telescope to move when I use the hide/reveal commands. I was not able to see the light paths though--I'll check again to see if I've missed something. I can't help thinking that some modifications to Celestia might make it easier to implement the Hale add-on. For example, it would be nice to have some way to trigger scripts that modify the positions and orientations. Right now, you're relying on selecting objects, but maybe something that could be exposed directly through the UI? Script actions for objects? Also, there should be a way to hide and show objects without having to move them off to vast distances. --Chris On Dec 19, 2007 6:21 AM, <se...@le...> wrote: > Gentle folk, > > A preliminary version of v2 of my Hale Telescope Addon for Celestia > is available at > http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_v20b2.zip<http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/%7Eseb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_v20b2.zip> > (~7.5MB, expands to ~35MB) > > If you would like to give it a try and tell me of any significant > problems or mistakes, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've worked on it for > so long that I don't know what's missing in the instructions, for example. > I'm sure there are things I've overlooked in the modelling, too. All of > my testing has been done under Windows XP. > > I'm hoping to make the final version publicly available this weekend, > or certainly no later than Monday. I'm sorry for the rather late > notice. > > It requires a recent pre-release version of Celestia v1.5.0 because of > its use of ScriptedOrbits and reference frames, neither of which are > available in Celestia v1.4.1. > > Thanks for whatever help you can provide. > > Selden > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > SF.Net email is sponsored by: > Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. > It's the best place to buy or sell services > for just about anything Open Source. > > http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace > _______________________________________________ > Celestia-developers mailing list > Cel...@li... > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/celestia-developers > |
From: Selden E B. Jr <se...@le...> - 2007-12-19 20:30:01
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Chris wrote > First of all: WOW! This is very impressive work (and a real torture test for > scripted rotations and trajectories.) I have no trouble getting the > different parts of telescope to move when I use the hide/reveal commands. I > was not able to see the light paths though--I'll check again to see if I've > missed something. Take a look at /scripts/show_lightpaths.cel It uses the appropriate hide/reveal commands for the light beams and "photons". > I can't help thinking that some modifications to Celestia might make it > easier to implement the Hale add-on. For example, it would be nice to have > some way to trigger scripts that modify the positions and orientations. > Right now, you're relying on selecting objects, but maybe something that > could be exposed directly through the UI? Script actions for objects? Some rambling musings follow... Could the existing Cel:// URLs be adapted for this, perhaps? Scripts can invoke URLs. Could the URLs be redesigned to carry arhitrary state information which could be read by both UI scripts and Scripted functions? (See below for one reason why I ask this.) (A general-purpose inter-process communications faciilty that both environments could use might be a better solution, since it'd support control by external programs, too. My impression is that several different groups have made modifications to Celestia to support this. On the other hand, low-overhead intra-process communications wuld be a reasonable complement to a high-overhaad IPC facility.) My understanding is that one issue is that UI scripts and Scripted functions run in different environments within Celestia, which makes it hard for them to intercommunicate. A way to pass arbitrary Lua tables between the two would be very helpful. Hank posted some suggestions on the Forum for how this might be done, but I seem to recall that his solution wasn't as general as I'd like. My interim solution has the advantage of working for both Cel and Celx scripts, which shared tables would not be able to do. (Although, of course, Cel scripts can be called from Celx scripts.) I toyed with the idea of reading and writing disk files, but decided that had way too much overhead. I'd also like to be able to use HTML to design a control screen. Unfortunately, calling scripts and running programs directly from HTML is annoyingly complicated by the different security restrictions in the different browsers. This is why I asked a while ago about the possibility of Cel:// URLs which only did state and object selections but not positioning. I tried deleting the xyz coordinates from a URL, but Celestia didn't seem to recognize the result. > Also, > there should be a way to hide and show objects without having to move them > off to vast distances. I agree: being able to enable and disable rendering on a per-object basis would be very helpful. My (perhaps mistaken) impression was that selecting objects to display was already planned for a future release of Celestia. Since I needed something that would work now, this seemed a reasonable workaround. s. > --Chris > On Dec 19, 2007 6:21 AM, <se...@le...> wrote: > > Gentle folk, > > > > A preliminary version of v2 of my Hale Telescope Addon for Celestia > > is available at > > http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_v20b2.zip<http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/%7Eseb/celestia/files/hale_telescope_v20b2.zip> > > (~7.5MB, expands to ~35MB) > > > > If you would like to give it a try and tell me of any significant > > problems or mistakes, I'd greatly appreciate it. I've worked on it for > > so long that I don't know what's missing in the instructions, for example. > > I'm sure there are things I've overlooked in the modelling, too. All of > > my testing has been done under Windows XP. > > > > I'm hoping to make the final version publicly available this weekend, > > or certainly no later than Monday. I'm sorry for the rather late > > notice. > > > > It requires a recent pre-release version of Celestia v1.5.0 because of > > its use of ScriptedOrbits and reference frames, neither of which are > > available in Celestia v1.4.1. > > > > Thanks for whatever help you can provide. > > > > Selden |