Cosmonium: A 3D astronomy and space exploration program

This is really impressive! The ISS screenshot deserves to be on the Panda3D’s website imho. :slight_smile: If you want to extend your l10n to italian, I am available. Gratz!

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Congratulations on the new release :slight_smile: !

But it looks like a file (shuttle_controls.egg.pz) is missing (at least from the Windows installer), as reported here:

t’en fais pas, ça arrive :wink: .

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Thank you all for you kind words and support !

All the DirectGui contribs are incredibly useful, it allowed me to test and modify parameters and things in app in real time instead of continuously modify config files and restart the app. You can’t imagine how much time I saved thanks to you :slight_smile:

Thank you ! And any contribution is always warmly welcome :slight_smile:

Saperlipopette, je me suis fait eu ! The file is indeed missing :frowning: It’s actually coming from the Panda3D distribution, and if you have Panda3D installed at a usual place the app gets it from there and hide the bug… I guess a bug fix release is in order :slight_smile:

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Ah, that’s excellent to read! :slight_smile:

Do you have any python script examples that show how to start the engine with given bodies/objects/reference frame and control the objects’+camera positions and attitude in that frame?
Je cherche un petit outil de visualisation pour de la dynamique orbitale et ce serait avec plaisir que j’utiliserais ton joli travail :slight_smile:

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You can use the --default option on the command line to specify the target object at start up, or configure it in the cosmonium.yaml config file (see the syntax in the wiki page.

It’s possible to attach a controller script to bodies/object and so program their trajectory and attitude (I see I still have to document it in the wiki though…)

Lastly, it’s not possible for a script to take control of the camera yet, but it’s an easy change: the camera code use the same interface as the object controllers so I think I can fix that quickly :slight_smile:

It’s a pleasure! We can continue in PM if you want and discuss more in detail what the app should do for your use case (et basculer en français si tu veux :stuck_out_tongue: )

A new bugfix release, V0.2.1, is now available. It fixes the infamous crash occurring when opening the editor or the preference window, a couple of issues with shadows, and some performance issues.

It also contains Italian translation (many thanks to @flavio), a more sleek layout for the editors (many thanks also to @Epihaius), support of overlap for the heightmap (this remove normal seams between the patches), better data interpolation and filtering to remove surface artefacts, additional command for cel script, improved camera and navigation control, basic plugin support, preliminary SDK to control the engine, etc.

Here is a LEM on the Apollo 15 landing site with Mons Hadley in the background. This is using the Lunar Orbiter DEM to render the elevation

(Surface self-shadowing is still missing, also higher definition DEM should be stacked to have accurate depiction of the terrain around the LEM, and detail map could be used to make the surface more dusty but that’s for another release :stuck_out_tongue: )

The next step is to rewrite the core of the engine and separate the astronomy, simulation and rendering aspects (and port the simulation part entirely to C++). This should make the engine scalable and more efficient. Once done, the rendering could then be improved to have better realism.

As usual the binaries can be downloaded from here and the full changelog is available there :slight_smile:

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@eldee, very nice!
Thank you for development!

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