I am sure you are closer to release than when I joined the group. Would you please consider release under a closed system? I envision a release with a disclaimer that no requests or patches will be entertained or responded to, other than those of the core team; even compile issues will be ignore.

Well, indeed, much progress has been achieved with celestia.Sci development in the meantime. Yet our team is still small and "real life" tends to catch up with the members at times: final exams, job finding, earning money, family etc.

Despite occasional slow-downs for such reasons, I still prefer to release celestia.Sci under a standard open source license when the time is ready.

Thank you, however, for your proposal.

Fridger

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Hello, no release schedule yet? Thanks

No, but our small team has been very recently reinforced by a very
experienced "celestian"...

Fridger

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Don't know if you can all view this but I thought it was appropiate for this thread.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article ... a-universe

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If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

Orbiter username ShuttleCommander.

Yes, we can!
https://youtu.be/jjXyqcx-mYY

F.

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_________________
If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

Orbiter username ShuttleCommander.

t00friI wrote: "still prefer to release celestia.Sci under a standard open source license when the time is ready."

It's getting more and more inconvenient to use Celestia 1.6.1 in 2017.

People are suffering here.

Please have mercy.

Release it. Please?

I second the motion!
Release it already.

_________________
If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

Orbiter username ShuttleCommander.

sjohn I believe we are being ignored!

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If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

Orbiter username ShuttleCommander.

More than 1 1/2 years later, there is still not the slightest sign of celestia.Sci for anyone else but the developers. Showing screenshots, precision events and comments about how well it all works on oh so many platforms does not help at all for the rest of us.

Why don't you just publish access to some version control system of your choice and tell us not to bother you with support requests? I'm sure, some users will manage to compile on their systems anyway and will be able to help others.
There's nothing to loose for you, but you might get something back, like bug fixes. Really, not everyone has to be a professional astrophysicist to help the project. There might even be professional software developers around .

If you don't want to do your development in the open, and only release when you think it's ready - a day that never will come, as I can tell you from my own experience - then maybe open source development is not the right thing for you after all.

I'm sorry, if this may sound rude or impolite - it's not meant that way. I'm just afraid that celestia.Sci will never become something real, because the last person interested turned away.

Steffen

Three months later and still nothing!

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If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

Orbiter username ShuttleCommander.

How about making some useful/interesting contributions to the forum instead of complaining persistently?

Fridger

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Fridger:

It has been over 4 years since you split away from Celestia development, and launched Celestia.Sci. In that time, you and the few member of the development team have altered the program from a great space simulation into a spectacular one. In particular, your development of galaxies has been just mind-blowing. They look so real now that looking at your pictures in the forum, it is easy to envision the program as a real window into the real universe, with the ability to accurately travel to most places in the mapped universe.

Thousands of Celestia users continue to use 1.6.1, and enjoy its abilities. However, for those who have discovered your efforts to produce Celestia.Sci, we have been waiting for four long years for its eventual release. I for one, recently agreed to offer a free Astronomy course to senior citizens in my local community ... pro bono ... to enrich their lives with highlights of recent developments in cosmology, astronomy and particle physics. I retired from teaching 2 years ago, but remain a devoted fan of Celestia, and Astronomy education. To that end, I want to take this seniors group on a fresh tour of the universe, using Celestia to visit some stars and galaxies. While the galaxies in Celestia 1.6.1 are good, they cannot come close to matching the galaxies in Celestia.Sci, based on your forum screenshots. I would love to use Celestia-Sci to wow this deserving audience!

It was with obvious disappointment today to visit the forum and discover that you still are promising to someday release Celestia.Sci to the open source community, but 4 years later, have still declined to do so. It is like a "teaser" that does not appear will ever be fulfilled. Virtually none of us have any coding skill, are not Mathematicians, Astronomers, Cosmologists or Physicists, and while we can tinker with an addon or two, we simply cannot contribute to making the core program more accurate or visually beautiful. All we can do is wait ... and wait ... for its release.

It sure looks mature enough to be introduced to the public. Obviously, it is your program and you have every right to release it or not, but what the posters in this thread are asking is ... just how long does the public have to hang on? If you have disagreements with some members of the public over how they might use the released program, or how they might try to add fictional "addons" to it that might reduce its scientific value (e.g. - StarTrek addons, etc.), I can understand that and can even agree with you. You and I have had "words" over that issue years ago, when I was contributing to Celestia's use as an educational tool in high school classrooms.

However, if your emotions are preventing you from releasing the program soon, then logic suggests you will never be ready to release it, and all promises to do so are just untrue.

So, with great respect for your skills in this area, and your long history of Celestia development, would you be kind enough to level with the rest of us, and give us a true time-frame for release ... or not? It is reasonable that after 4 years of waiting in vain, an accurate update would be fair to your fans and followers. If you feel you are still years more away from release, then please just say so. Conversely, if by now, you can set a firm date for release, is that not something that is worthy of sharing with your forum members?

Respectfully,
Frank

Hi Frank,


First of all, just for the books:
The celestia.Sci "adventure" started already in 2010, i.e. 7 years ago. Until 2013, I worked on it alone and owned the Copyright of the new code, which was shared later with the other team members who had joined in meanwhile.

I wish I could give you and the other waiting members of the community a reasonably reliable time window for the release of the first public celestia.Sci version. There are various facts that contribute to that significant uncertainty.

• With my collaborators in the team, we have recently indeed turned to address some final administrative challenges that have to be surmounted before a first release: like switching from a SVN-based celestia.Sci repository to GitHub. Or like switching from http:// to a more secure https:// access to our CelestialMatters (CM) site. Since I am not very knowledgable in these matters, I have to heavily rely on my collaborators here.
  
  
• Unfortunately "real life" seems to be catching up on them... For example Dawoon (aka DW or dirkpitt) has won a permanent research position with KARI (Korean AeroSpace Research Institute) as of January first of this year. It turns out that he was assigned to a department that is well known for overworking their members (with DW being father of a sweet little girl since a short time!! ). So, as a consequence, Dawoon was entirely missing from the celestia.Sci team for a period of > 4 months since Jan. 1st. Too bad, since it was in very close collaboration of myself with him that led to a general and completely new framework for Gravitational Lensing in celestia.Sci! See e.g. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=715
  
  
• Also Andrew Tribick had to follow various committments for more than a month, recently. Andrew is currently a most important team member as to the implementation of EXO planets in general and the Trappist-1 system in particular...
  
  
• Last not least, about 12 weeks ago, my wife stumbled on our terrace and fell badly, ending up with a complicated fracture of her right-hand shoulder joint. Since she was completely helpless thereafter, my spare time was entirely used up by helping her with the simple things of daily life! Fortunately, since she exercised with very high discipline throughout the past 12 weeks, she is again in surprisingly good condition meanwhile...and I can continue with coding

I can only hope that my collaborators will soon find time again for jointly completing with me the work that is still required before a first release of celestia.Sci to the public.

Sorry that I can't give you a more concise schedule as of today. But at least, I tried to give you and others here an honest summary about the things we struggled with besides celestia.Sci.

Cheers,
Fridger

PS: how about this GUI style?
[Click on image, followed by hitting fullscreen in your browser (F11 for FF)

All in 64bit, latest Qt 5.9, latest Eigen 3.3.x,... MSVC 2017, gcc6_64. Stable operation in Windows 7 - 10, Linux, MacOS

If preferred, a bright "legacy" style for the two dock widgets can be chosen via a single option in the configuration file celestia.Sci.cfg.

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