Re: [Celestia-developers] Long/Lat

[Grant H. <gra...@bl...>]

Chris:
> That's very strange . . .  Perhaps try the Mars locations from here:
>
> http://www.shatters.net/~claurel/celestia/files/locations/
>
> Then use this URL:
>
>
cel://Follow/Sol:Mars/2003-06-20T18:54:18.88520?x=+LpfmTHNpQLGDA&y=Cs257jtvT
lz//////////w&z=n2jwGdl27L0U&ow=0.487169&ox=-0.200838&oy=0.835443&oz=0.15609
1&select=Sol:Mars&fov=33.012623&ts=1.000000&rf=1029182210&lm=1862270976&ltd=
0&rf=1923&lm=128
>
> The URL should force on location labels even if the keyboard toggle isn't
> working for some reason.

Weird. That works fine now, as do all the other location files. And the "&"
key works as a toggle.
I've tried switching off and on various render options to see if one of my
settings was causing the problem, but so far I can't reproduce the original
problem.

Some observations:
1) A number of features in your various location files are set to Size 0,
and are therefore invisible. By stripping this setting out, I've been able
to make them visible. I guess that should be the default for a feature
listed with a diameter of zero by the IAU.

2) Venus, the Uranians and Triton all need the feature latitudes multiplied
by -1 to convert them to Celestia orientation.

3) I have a bug in the location names display if I run Celestia windowed and
the window height exceeds its width by more than a small margin. The names
become clipped by an otherwise invisible disc, centred on the planetary
disc. This starts small but expands to be about the width of the planetary
disc when the window width is reduced towards minimum. (I'm running Windows
XP Professional 2002 SP1 on a 1.9GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and a GeForce4
Ti 4600.)

4) You've got a number of typographical errors arising from the import of
IAU names. The IAU use a convention for accented characters that goes [back
slash][accent code][character to be accented]. So an e-acute is written
"\'e" and an o-macron is written "\-o". It looks like you've stripped the
back-slash but left the following character, so there are colons and
apostrophes and hyphens appearing inappropriately. No way to reprocess the
current data, because obviously a few of the existing hyphens and
apostrophes are supposed to be there - only the ones that used to be
preceeded by a back-slash should be stripped out. But given that Celestia
doesn't support accented characters at present, it should be simple enough
to reprocess the original data to merely remove all back-slashes and the
immediately subsequent character during the process of importation.

Is Location intended to work with 3ds models, too? I've been trying to place
a label at a suitable altitude on Phobos, but so far it hasn't worked.

Grant