Re: [Stellarium-pubdevel] Extinction now working for point sources, and several questions and notes on developments.

[Bogdan M. <dag...@gm...>]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Georg Zotti <geo...@un...> wrote:
> [snip]
> OK, so the resource file is a clear no-go here. I speak of 3D models,
> which are large, exchangeable and loadable via a GUI list similar to
> "Landscapes". I think an install script is not necessary, just unpack and
> copy into your Stellarium data folder. The question is, shall I add a
> folder "modules" into the main folder, in which I now add "scenery3d"
> (because it's a plugin and plugin data go into subfolders of "modules"),
> or shall I add a "scenery3d" folder directly, because it's a concept
> similar to "landscapes".

I think that adding it directly under the main directory, together
with "landscapes"/"stars"/"nebulae", would be the best variant for
now. I'm not sure about the name, though. You can try asking Fabien
directly for input.

>[snip]
>>> It would be
>>> helpful to have a right-click behaviour like "open config panel" -
>>> currently I must use 2 buttons.
>>
>> Overriding the right click will be tricky, because it is currently
>> used to de-select objects.
> Then maybe with double-click? Or can a button "grab" the right-click event
> before forwarding to the main app?

I think that you can make a button that will open a drop-down menu on
clicking it. Look at the current code of the Oculars plug-in for an
example of a drop-down menu, though it works with a keyboard shortcut
instead of a button click.

>[snip]
>> One of the reasons of the migration is that there is a MediaWiki
>> extension that can export a collection of wiki pages as a PDF file.
>> Unfortunately, it doesn't work with our site because of SourceForge's
>> hosting policies. The Wiki was supposed to be moved together with the
>> site on a seprate server When We Enable the DSS Background, but I
>> don't know what's the current state of this, as Fabien has dropped off
>> the radar.
> Uh, that's bad to read! Who else in the team is OpenGL expert now?

Well, Fabien hasn't given up on the project yet. :) AFAIK, it's just
that he has a new job now and still hasn't settled down, so he doesn't
have time for Stellarium. I also think that Nokia's decisions about
MeeGo/Maemo/Qt have caused him some disappointment.

I think that the only OpenGL expert that we have at the moment is
hikiko/Eleni Maria Stea, our Summer of Code in Space student. :)

>
>>> [accuracy, documentation]
>> That will be somewhat hard. Stellarium is optimized for fast
>> rendering, not accuracy. There are some fudge factors included in the
>> code, as well as some outright "nobody will care about that". Hight
>> accuracy generally means more calculations and a lower
>> frame-per-second rate. When Fabien was working on the Nokia N900 port,
>> he even made some parameters to use a lower precision format (float
>> instead of double).
>
> I had seen this change, but did not know exactly why. OK, it's not a
> problem for landscapes, but definitely for long-term computations. It will
> be an important point to consider for me.
>
>> Also, I think that the person responsible for some of the orbital
>> modeling code no longer hangs around. :)
> Yes, what a pity!

Due to my work on the Solar System Editor plug-in I may need to dive
into that code and try to figure out what it does exactly.

Regards,
Bogdan Marinov