New Earth Overlay Textures

[maxim]

The integration of additional information panes into celestia would of course be a very good idea. That would work very well for certain tasks. Unfortunately legend/key tables tend to have unusual formats like this:



or are quite big like this one that will become part of my ongoing project of a geologic earth:



So I would extend your outline of an information pane by possibilities of free positioning and free size definition and, additionally, by a page switching mechanism for those legends that are even too big to be presented completely on the screen. Thus an addon could be packaged with all necessary and additional informations that now are only present in the readme files and *.scc comments. Not only technical textures would benefit from that. Conceptual addons like black holes, pulsars and others could explain their purpose, limits and asumptions made. And designers of custom systems could explain their fantasy worlds in details or point out certain highlights.

But I still wouldn't leave the ideas of floating overlay information or information on custom bodies. They have their own purposes. Informational custom bodies could be of good use with (educational) scripts. Besides their implementation is possible without depending on a certain celestia version, they are also good stopping points. And giving them a funny shape could be of good use especially for children following the lesson.

I think all this is worth of further/deeper considerations.

have nice days,

maxim.

[selden]

But if you're starting to talk about "floating panes" and "resizable windows," aren't those facilities already available with the "InfoURL" declaration? It opens a browser window which displays any file or Web page that was specified in the "InfoURL".

Right now, the user does have to actually open it using the RMB popup menu, however. Maybe one of the developers could be persuaded to make InfoURL available from a CEL script?
(or maybe it'd be almost as effective to include an instruction in a script that says to use the RMB Info menu.)

Alternatively, why not make use of the "Navigation" "Tour Guide" menu item?

Right now it's just monochrome text, but maybe one of the developers could be persuaded to extend it to include images.

Do these suggestions help?

[maxim]

But if you're starting to talk about "floating panes" and "resizable windows," aren't those facilities already available with the "InfoURL" declaration? It opens a browser window which displays any file or Web page that was specified in the "InfoURL".

Well, I'm indeed planning to make a script that uses this feature. But for inline information display it has several disadvantages by now. First 'AltSurface' doesn't recognize it. It could only be used in a fully qualified object definition. Furthermore it doesn't work well in fullscreen mode. It brings up the 'Start' panel of Windows together with the browsers window (at least on my computer), and the window can be accidently pushed to background by a wrong mouseclick.

Alternatively, why not make use of the "Navigation" "Tour Guide" menu item?

That works better for the windowing concerns. But it seems to be a 'all or nothing' panel - no way to restrict it to a certain set of infos dependenting on the actual selection.

maybe one of the developers could be persuaded to extend it to include images.

If they already had to be involved, why not persuade them for a little more?

maxim

[Buzz]

A nice option would be to show an info label on mouse roll over on these types of overlays, that is, a different info label for every colour/element rolled over. Don't know if that is hard to do though.

[maxim]

A nice option would be to show an info label on mouse roll over on these types of overlays, that is, a different info label for every colour/element rolled over. Don't know if that is hard to do though.

That would be shurely a nice thing.
It would need a working pick functionality. Picking is quite easy to use in Java3D, because it's well implemented there, but it's a long time ago that I've worked with OpenGL, so I don't know if it's yet available there (as part of the library functions). Otherways it would be difficult to implement.

maxim.

[maxim]

A new version of the overlay textures is available. The base elevation coloring has changed a little bit to reflect lowland/highland areas. Furthermore this distribution introduces 'Legend' a small custom moonlike body orbiting earth, showing legends or color keys on his surface.



enjoy,

maxim

[Michael Kilderry]

I like the Legend moon, I wonder if one-day big things like this will be used to advertise products in the Earth's sky .

Michael Kilderry

By the way, this is my 100th post. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!