egg changed the topic of #principia to: Logs: https://esper.irclog.whitequark.org/principia | <scott_manley> anyone that doubts the wisdom of retrograde bop needs to get the hell out | https://xkcd.com/323/ | <egg> calculating the influence of lamont on Pluto is a bit silly…
<queqiao->
⟨sichelgaita⟩ That article was written essentially by a single person (who appears quite defensive in discussions), cites articles all published by the same authors, and uses notations and conventions at odds with anything found in the literature, in particular the IERS documents. This leads to no end of confusion in the talk page. I am not stepping into that minefield.
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⟨Damien⟩ ⟪sichelgaita⟫ That article was written essentially by […] ⮪ Haha I know the feeling.
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⟨Damien⟩ Not my circus, not my monkeys
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⟨egg⟩ I wonder whether we could have some […] ⮪ Al₂Me₆ do you have some thought on how such a thing might work?
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ I feel like allowing the camera to be centered anywhere is an excessive level of genericity… space is mostly empty after all
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ The only other region/center of interest IMO are probably another body/vessel, markers, or one of the Lagrange points
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ As for the tracking bodies issue in the new frame, what if we overrode the ‘reset focus’ feature? As in, when in XYL, backtick resets focus to the primary system barycenter.
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⟨egg⟩ various things along the noodles can be interesting, and they don’t necessarily have a marker associated with them
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⟨egg⟩ hm, I was not aware of that feature.
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⟨egg⟩ ⟪Al₂Me₆⟫ I feel like allowing the camera to be […] ⮪ Well, part of the point is to have a model that is not a turntable.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ Ah
<queqiao->
⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ Then perhaps add a toggle between the _status quo_ and a free camera mode, which is just standard 3D user interaction (by some definition of ‘standard’)? For KSP flight scene there’s https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/193054-* (which is indispensable for me).
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ Of course, that comes at the cost of confusion, as it would be the user’s job to orient themselves
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ I suppose you can draw some kind of mini coordination marker _à la_ CAD software, but instead of a cube, it can be more relevant to the reference frame
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ * software/Blender,
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⟨egg⟩ ⟪Al₂Me₆⟫ Then perhaps add a toggle between the […] ⮪ Free-but-there-is-an-up (the z axis of the reference frame) could be a more accessible option. But then you were annoyed by the roll on reference frame switch, so maybe it is not that nice.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ ⟪egg⟫ various things along the noodles can be […] ⮪ Purely idealistically I’d say such a thing should be achieved by hovering the noodle at the point of interest and then clicking ‘aim at’ or some such (_cf._ the advanced tweakables equivalent for parts). But then if you had that you also have interactive maneuver node markers, &c.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ ⟪egg⟫ Free-but-there-is-an-up (the z axis of […] ⮪ Perhaps. I’d be too biased to comment there 😛
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Tbh the only time I’ve had the desire to aim at some arbitrary point is during the execution of long flight plans, where I’d wanted to see how close the noodle got to the prediction at some point. But arguably that’s better judged by looking at the noodle as a whole/near the destination, since I imagine it’d be hard to judge the scale of a lone noodle floating in nothingness.
<queqiao->
⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ As for the tracking bodies issue in the […] ⮪ This is admittedly not very discoverable, but then, the barycenter _is_ just floating in space so there’s not really a great way to get back to it short of drawing a marker for it on the map? But if you tried to draw that it’d be inside the secondary most of the time…
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⟨egg⟩ the thing is the barycentre is not an interesting place at all.
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⟨egg⟩ It is a clearly defined fixed point, but you want to be looking at features of the potential in various places .
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⟨egg⟩ which we cannot really identify and do not want to spam markers for anyway.
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⟨egg⟩ It is a clearly defined fixed point, but you want to be looking at features of the potential in various places.
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⟨egg⟩ EPIC (widefield) ⮪ Consider, e.g., this; the camera is targeting the Earth, but that is dumb, and the Earthmoo barycentre would not be better.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ ⟪egg⟫ Free-but-there-is-an-up (the z axis of […] ⮪ Hm. Maybe there’s a different UX that can be presented for this proposal. In which the current mode becomes ‘aim at and fix body’ and the new mode is ‘camera is stationary WRT the reference frame’.
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⟨egg⟩ Yes. Right now the camera has a fixed _orientation_ in the plotting frame, but is only stationary if you are looking at something that happens to be stationary.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ ⟪egg⟫ the thing is the barycentre is not an […] ⮪ I agree it’s not interesting. But it’s still the most sensible default focus point for the frame and there should be some reasonable UX for getting back to it if the user desired.
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⟨egg⟩ The primary of the secondary system is probably fine (so Earth if you are in the SEL frame).
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ If we default to the untracked mode, yes.
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ Is there a reason we can’t have a camera that changes position, instead of just a camera turning around a specific point?
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ Like, in stock ksp we have a camera that focuses on Kerbin. You can view Kerbin from all angles, but you can’t view a certain point in space at all angles.
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ That’s what’s being discussed, yes.
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ So we can have both a feature to focus on Earth and on whatever point in space you like.
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ But is there a reason that certain ping can’t be any point?
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ _i.e._, you can pan the planetarium camera
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ * point
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ * point
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ But is there a reason that certain […] ⮪ Let the user decide which point they want to focus on, then click on that part of the orbit and it automatically focuses.
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ * How about letting
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ Purely idealistically I’d say such a […] ⮪ ^
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⟨Bee Rights Activist⟩ Oh, then I agree with you
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⟨Al₂Me₆⟩ ⟪_whitenotifier-1adf⟫ [Principia] pleroy opened pull request […] ⮪ Is there a way to uh, automate this tickling?
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⟨sichelgaita⟩ ⟪Al₂Me₆⟫ Is there a way to uh, automate this […] ⮪ It's actually a bit tricky. Making the computation of the flight plan completely asynchronous would probably be a bad idea: you tweak a manœuvre and it takes 3 s to react because the thread that computes the flight plan fights with a thread that computes equipotentials. What should happen is that, when the deadline is reached, we should keep asynchronously...
<queqiao->
... computing the positions of the celestials. We could then tell the user "your flight plan is not fully computed, but please hold the line, your call is very important to us".