Aciqra

These last few months have passed without too much progress. Fairweather is now evermore usable. It's gotten an updated interface. There are a few extra features. The developmental version appears far advanced from when Fairweather was in Milestone ... [More] 2. Yet, on the whole, Milestone 3 is still far off. Incredibly far off. So far, just a third of the milestone goals have been completed.The lack of apparent progress is mainly due to the work on the other, unlisted requirements. With the addition of the Hipparcos star catalog, Fairweather became incredibly slow on machines with 1 GB of RAM or less. Slowness as in sub frame-per-second slowness. Considering that a good portion (perhaps 5-10%) of computer users today have 512 MB of RAM or less, it is important for Fairweather to at least run on 1 GB without problems. It would be nice to support systems with 512 MB of RAM eventually, but for the time being, the minimum requirements will remain at 1 GB for the Hipparcos catalog. The Bright Star Catalog may work fine on these lighter systems. However, it is has not been tested. Currently, Fairweather is about the same speed at displaying stars as Milestone 2 was.The newly added features include saving screenshots to file, changed fonts, information display, keyboard shortcuts for menu icons, displaying deep space objects at a more reasonable size, highlighting the selected object as well as the inclusion of the Hipparcos catalog.Download stats:May, 2011: 478June, 2011: 326Combined: 804This was a 14% decrease from the previous 2 month period. June, 2011 set the record low for number of downloads during a full month. [Less]

These last few months have passed without too much progress. Fairweather is now evermore usable. It's gotten an updated interface. There are a few extra features. The developmental version appears far advanced from when Fairweather was in Milestone ... [More] 2. Yet, on the whole, Milestone 3 is still far off. Incredibly far off. So far, just a third of the milestone goals have been completed.The lack of apparent progress is mainly due to the work on the other, unlisted requirements. With the addition of the Hipparcos star catalog, Fairweather became incredibly slow on machines with 1 GB of RAM or less. Slowness as in sub frame-per-second slowness. Considering that a good portion (perhaps 5-10%) of computer users today have 512 MB of RAM or less, it is important for Fairweather to at least run on 1 GB without problems. It would be nice to support systems with 512 MB of RAM eventually, but for the time being, the minimum requirements will remain at 1 GB for the Hipparcos catalog. The Bright Star Catalog may work fine on these lighter systems. However, it is has not been tested. Currently, Fairweather is about the same speed at displaying stars as Milestone 2 was.The newly added features include saving screenshots to file, changed fonts, information display, keyboard shortcuts for menu icons, displaying deep space objects at a more reasonable size, highlighting the selected object as well as the inclusion of the Hipparcos catalog.Download stats:May, 2011: 478June, 2011: 326Combined: 804This was a 14% decrease from the previous 2 monthd. June, 2011 set the record low for number of downloads during a full month. [Less]

It has been another three months since the last update. Since then, much progress has been made towards a working 2.1 release this December. Milestone 2 has been released and work on Milestone 3 has commenced. At this point, work is progressing ... [More] slower than what had been previously anticipated. The release date for this next milestone is still uncertain but is now more likely to be in mid to late August rather than July. Things can still change however and even an early July release still cannot be ruled out.Milestone 2 was released back in April and included many changes and additions on top of Milestone 1. It remains rather primitive when compared to most other planetarium programs including Aciqra I. Therefore, it is still not recommended for use by an average user. Milestone 3 aims to change that and will become the Aciqra II Preview release and will be the first actual public release of Aciqra II as it will be a viable alternative to Aciqra I.As previously mentioned, progress on Milestone 3 is far behind schedule. The current SQLite-based database system is far too slow for all but the tiniest of catalogs. Even the Hipparcos catalog of just 120,000 stars takes several seconds to load which is unacceptable considering that it is to be the smallest of the star catalogs available for the final release. At this rate, use of the 2.5 million star Tycho-2 catalog would be unthinkable. The current move is towards using a different format other than SQLite for these star databases so that they would load faster. The new code is being written in C to reduce memory usage which is also an issue; the Tycho-2 catalog current takes up 4GB of memory — way too much.With these problems in mind, development continues on. Hopefully, by the time the next update rolls around, these issues will be resolved — though probably with a new set waiting in line for a fix. [Less]

Beginning in a week or so, the Aciqra project will begin migrating code currently written in I into C. Currently, the entirety of the project is written in I though strongly supported by the accompanying Aloac library. Being a scripting language, I ... [More] is slow (likely running at 50% its potential speed) and uses up several times more memory than it actually needs to.The transition to C will not be a complete move. Aciqra was originally written in I for the purpose of fast development and easy maintenance. That still holds true for much of the project. However, that is now no longer true for certain parts which are unlikely to ever see change. Moreover, these parts are often those which are most computationally expensive and so slow down the program the most. After incredible levels of optimization, the only solution remaining is to convert them into C.Previously, such moves would result in code being added to Aloac but that becomes impossible if the focus of the code is completely unrelated to astronomical calculations. Therefore, this new code will end up in libaciqra. This library will be made to conform to ANSI C standards and so will be cross-platform as it currently is.The following have been selected for migration: Loaders of large object catalog with > 50,000 objects Sector calculation library Star drawing loop (only the loop, actual drawing set to remain as it is)Others may follow in the future as needed. This migration is expected to speed up Aciqra by around 25% and reduce memory usage by around 200% when using large catalogs such as the Tycho-2 catalog. [Less]

The Aciqra II database format has been, since its creation, powered by SQLite. However, as larger and larger databases are needed, the database load speed take increasingly unbearable hits. With the current SQLite system, the Hipparcos catalog of ... [More] 118000 stars takes a full thirty times longer than it takes to load the 9000 stars of the Bright Star Catalog. That means the Tycho-2 catalog (2.5 million stars) will potentially take several minutes to load making it and any further extended catalogs essentially impossible to use. Therefore, for the larger catalogs (> 20,000 objects), a new catalog system is needed.The file structure is unlikely to be changed. The star database files are planned to be stored where they always have been stored; in the data folder. What will change is the structure of these databases. These will no longer be in SQLite format. Instead, they will be in binary or plain text format though still containing the usual information. The load speed should be more or less linear relative to the database size and so will benefit the loading of large catalogs.Smaller catalogs such as NGC/IC and the Bright Star Catalog will continue to use the existing SQLite format unless there is significant (>10%) improvement in load speed. [Less]

It has now been almost five months since the last milestone of Aciqra II. Since then, much has changed with countless adjustments, new features and optimization improvements. These have been compiled into a new release, Milestone II as the march ... [More] towards Aciqra 2.1 continues.A list of changes has been released with the release statement on Caglow Central.This release is the first of Aciqra II to be made as a binary release. This improves the program load speed by an appreciable amount by eliminating comments/whitespace in the code. Downloads are available in the Aciqra downloads archive.Source code can be downloaded from Subversion.Who Should Download Milestone 2?Milestone 2 is not a completed release. It cannot be guaranteed to be free of bugs and is only meant to be used to preview what may happen next.That said, anyone who holds interest in the Aciqra project are highly encouraged to download and install a copy of this latest version of Aciqra. This release is considered usable though it is still lacking in a few critical features such as display of the ground and constellations. [Less]

With the addition of short-term precession correction, Aciqra II Fairweather (Grand) Milestone 2 is now feature complete. No more new features, only adjustments, will be added until release. Packaging will commence today and be finalized on Saturday ... [More] , April 30, 2011. The actual release is expected to come that same day. This is one day earlier than the original projection of May 01, 2011 announced last week.Milestone 2 will include most, but not all features necessary in a basic planetarium such as Aciqra I. Because of this, it will not be recommended for new users of Aciqra. [Less]

Recently, the Aciqra website has received a redesign. This redesign is meant to not only look better than before but also be more accessible and user-friendly than the original design. Most notably, the images section has returned with screenshots of ... [More] Aciqra which are useful as a visual introduction to the program and to keep up with developmental progress.The wiki is now the centerpiece of the site. News updates are already available on the front page on the upper right so there is no reason to show it twice. Moreover, the wiki is a better introduction to the program than the news articles which likely meant nothing to new users.The original CAPTCHA was extremely easy to break and so has been replaced with the more advanced CAPTCHA developed for Caglow Central. Bots created over 6000 user accounts which took up a large amount of space. To clear out those, every account that has not made a contribution to the site has been deleted. That does mean that a large number of legitimate users have been deleted. Anyone who had their account deleted is welcome to create a new one without having to expect it to be deleted again.Also, it has come to attention that the Contact Us does not work for anonymous users. Therefore, it now redirects to the main Caglow contact page for all users. Anyone who has ever, in the history of the site, sent a message with this system anonymously should try to resend it. This time, it should work.Feedback is ALWAYS appreciated so please leave any comments here or in the forums. Anonymous comments are now possible thanks to the new CAPTCHA so take advantage of it. [Less]

Though it has not received much attention lately, Aciqra I is still the primary product of the Aciqra project and will remain so until the end of this year when Aciqra II is released. Therefore, it still needs to be attended to and behind-the-scenes ... [More] , that is what has been done. This collection of fixes, adjustments and minor additions is now being released as Aciqra 1.3.2.This release features four main changes: Long-standing horizon bug fixed Updater now works Star sizes appear more realistic Minor adjustments in UIYes, that age-old horizon bug is now resolved. Therefore, full-sky and little planet views will finally show up properly. The virtual sky also appears more realistic thanks to a star-size function originally written for Aciqra II now backported to Aciqra I.Downloads are available on SourceForge, as always.There are expected to be, at most, two more releases of Aciqra I before the end of life limit is reached. Unless there are severe bugs, this current release is expected to be the last of Aciqra 1.3. [Less]

The time has again come to prepare for the release of another four months of work with Milestone 2. Though not all of the major features are complete, enough has been done that it is possible to make a projection date for the release of of the ... [More] milestone. As of today, with 70% certainty, Aciqra II Milestone 2 is projected to be released on May 01, 2011.This date is a delay of original plans which was to release this month. Nonetheless, the final release is still set in December and Milestone 3 should not be affected from its release in July.The latest developmental version of Aciqra is available through SVN: http://aciqra.svn.sf.net/svnroot/aciqra [Less]