Flying Carpet available

The flying carpet addon is now avaiable.
I didn't bother to try to keep the carpet level,
so it just moves in straight lines.

I did make the buttons bigger, though.


http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/flying_carpet_v1.zip (150KB)

Here it is at the entrance to the Hampton Court Maze, which is included in the Addon.

Flying Carpet

It's clear to me that the Hale Telescope Addon won't be ready for some months more since there are so many details that aren't right yet :(

So I've diverted some effort into a project that uses some of the Telescope's Lua control functions. I hope it'll be ready this coming weekend, even though it's only 90% finished ;)

It's a flying carpet.



Here it is hovering over the southern section of the Hale Observatory's property.

I could probably make it available as-is, but there are a few things I'd like to improve.

1. Reorient carpet and its motion relative to local down. This is relatively difficult. Currently the carpet stays oriented with respect to its initial position.

2. Provide some other local surface to navigate -- maybe a maze?

3. Reorient up/down buttons to point up/down

4. Use a picture of a Persian Carpet.

out of order

elevator no work

odd and ends

I added several "easy" things today:

• rotate dome manually
  
• raise and lower windscreen manually(but not really: it either tracks automatically or is down. I haven't figured out a way to track the telescope in azimuth easily.)
  
• raise and lower central lift (seen below)
  

I've been frustrating about the two conventional elevators: one is for freight and one is for people. Implementing the buttons and controls for the elevator algorithm would be a pain. Maybe I'll just chicken out and hang "out of order" signs on them.

Equipment entrance & freight elevator

I've spent some time making the overhead door work. It included cutting a hole in the model of the base, making a separate model of the door, and implementing open/close buttons outside the entrance.

Here it is with the door partially open. You can see the freight elevator shaft in the background. The elevator is only partially implemented. Its up/down buttons haven't been created yet, nor have the doors to the shaft with their buttons.

Sidereal Clock

Wanting to feel I'd actually accomplished something, I decided to make a very tiny piece of the telescope Addon available.

siderealclock.zip
(34KB, expands to ~100KB)

It displays the current sidereal time at its location within Celestia. Sidereal time is defined to be the hour angle of the vernal equinox. Operationally, that means it's the Right Ascension of an object that's precisely overhead.