192 lines
7.1 KiB
Plaintext
192 lines
7.1 KiB
Plaintext
Celestia: A real-time visual space simulation
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Copyright (C) 2001, Chris Laurel <claurel@shatters.net>
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--
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This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
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modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
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as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
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of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
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but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
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GNU General Public License for more details.
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You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
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along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
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Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307,
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USA.
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--
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This is a very rough release of Celestia, but all the basic
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functionality is there. Navigation and UI in general are very rudimentary.
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Getting started:
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Important: Celestia must be started from the directory in which the EXE
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resides or else it will not find its data files. A real installer is
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forthcoming.
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Celestia will start up in a window, and if everything is working
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correctly, you'll see a few stars and some text showing your velocity
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and the current time (Universal Time, so it'll probably be a few hours
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off from your computer's clock.) Drag the mouse around to change your
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orientation and you should see some familiar constellations. Click on
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a star to select it. Some information about the star will be
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displayed in the top left corner of the window. Press G (or use the
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navigation menu), and you'll zoom through space toward the selected
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star. If you press G again, you'll approach the star even closer.
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Press H to select our Sun, and then G to go back to our solar system.
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You'll find yourself half a light year away from the sun, which looks
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merely like a bright star at this range. Press G three more times to
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get within about 30 AU of the sun and you will be to see a few become
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visible near the sun. Right click to bring up a menu of planets and
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other objects in the solar system. After selecting a planet from the
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menu, hit G again to travel toward it. Once there, hold down the right
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moust button and drag to orbit the planet.
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That covers the very basics . . .
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MOUSE FUNCTIONS:
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Left drag to orient camera
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Right drag to orbit the selected object
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Drag while holding left and right buttons to dolly camera
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Left-click to select; double click to center selection
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Right-click to bring up planets menu
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Roll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out
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Click the wheel to reset the field of view to 45 degrees
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KEYBOARD COMMANDS
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Navigation:
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H : Select the sun (Home)
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C : Center on selected object
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G : Goto selected object
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F : Follow selected object
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Free movement:
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F1 : Stop
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F2 : Set velocity to 1 km/s
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F3 : Set velocity to 1,000 km/s
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F4 : Set velocity to 1,000,000 km/s
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F5 : Set velocity to 1 AU/s
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F6 : Set velocity to 1 ly/s
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A : Increase velocity by 10x
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Z : Decrease velocity by 10x
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Q : Reverse direction
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X : Set movement direction toward center of screen
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Time:
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Space : stop time
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L : Time 10x faster
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K : Time 10x slower
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Options:
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N : Toggle planet and moon labels
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O : Toggle planet orbits
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V : Toggle HUD Text
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W : Toggle Wireframe mode
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ESC : Exit
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It's possible to choose a star or planet by name. There are two ways to
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enter a star name: choose 'Select Object' from the Navigation menu to
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bring up a dialog box, or by hitting Enter, typing in the name, and
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pressing Enter again. You can use common names, or Bayer designations
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and HD catalog numbers for stars. Celestia is really picky about how
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you enter names. Planet and star names need to have the first letter
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capitalized. Bayer and Flamsteed designations need to be entered like this:
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Upsilon And
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51 Peg
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The constellation must be given as a three letter abbreviation and the
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full Greek letter name spelled out. Irritating, but it'll be fixed.
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HD catalog numbers must be entered with a space between HD and the number.
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Celestia handles star catalog numbers in a slightly kludgy way. To keep the
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star database size to minimum, only one catalog number is stored. Normally,
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this will a number from the HD catalog, but if a star isn't in the HD catalog
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the number from another catalog will be used instead. Currently, the secondary
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catalog is always the HIPPARCOS data set, for which the prefix "HIP" should be
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used.
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Basic Hacking Tips:
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It's possible to modify the solarsys.ssc, stars.dat, and hdnames.dat
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files to create an entirely fictional universe.
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The easiest file to modify is the solar system catalog, as it's a text
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file and the format is very text-editor friendly since that's how I
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had to enter all the data. It's also quite verbose, but that's not a
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problem yet.
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The units used for the solar system data may not be obvious. All
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angle fields in the catalog are in degrees. For planets, the period
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is specified in earth years, and the semi-major axis in AU; for
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satellites, days and kilometers are used instead.
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All solar system textures should be placed in the textures
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subdirectory. Currently, JPEG and BMP are the only formats supported.
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Models belong in the models directory. Celestia can read 3DS models,
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as well as a custom format (.cms files, used right now just for rough
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fractal displacement map likenesses of asteroids and small moons.) 3DS
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meshes are normalized to fit within a unit cube--the Radius field
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determines how big they appear within Celestia.
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The stars.dat file is a binary database of stars, processed from
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the 50+ meg HIPPARCOS data set. The first four bytes are an int
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containing the number of stars in the database. Following that
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are a bunch of records of this form:
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4 byte int : catalog number
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4 byte float : right ascension
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4 byte float : declination
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4 byte float : parallax
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2 byte int : apparent magnitude
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2 byte int : stellar class
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1 byte : parallax error
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RA, declination, and parallax are converted to x, y, z coordinates
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and apparent magnitude is converted to absolute magnitude when the
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database is read.
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Credits and Copyrights:
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Most of the planet maps are from David Seal's site: http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/.
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A few of these maps were modified by me, with fictional terrain added
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to fill in gaps. The model of the Galileo spacecraft is also from
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David Seal's site (though it was converter from Inventor to 3DS format.)
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The Venus, Saturn, and Saturn's rings textures are from Bjorn Jonsson.
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His site is http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/ and is an excellent resource
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for solar system rendering.
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3D asteroid models of Toutatis, Kleopatra, and Geographos are courtesy of
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Scott Hudson, Washington State University. His site is:
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http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hudson/Research/Asteroids/4179/index.html
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3D models of all other Phobos, Deimos, Amalthea, Proteus, Vesta, Ida,
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Mathilde, and Gaspra are derived from Phil Stooke's Cartography of
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Non-Spherical Worlds: http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/plancart.htm
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The texture font library I use for displaying text in OpenGL is
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copyright Mark Kilgard.
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The Intel JPEG library (ijl10.dll) is copyright Intel Corp.
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The star database (stars.dat) was derived from the HIPPARCOS data set.
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Chris Laurel
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claurel@shatters.net
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http://www.shatters.net/~claurel
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and
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http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ |