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geotime
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1995-03-18
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Geotime 1.2b - The "Ultimate" (?) Amiga clock
Copyright 1988,1989, 1992 by Mike Smithwick
Geotime consists of three separate programs, Geotime_m depicts a
earth map with day and nite sides shaded. You'll be able to observe the
earth's shadow scroll across the map in real-time based on the system clock.
Geotime_m_wb is a workbench version of the above.
The other program, Geotime_g is a workbench clock, and shows the earth as a
globe with day and nite sides. Like the map, the shadows will progress in
real-time showing the current phase of the earth.
And now a word from our sponsor:
Geotime 1.2b is freely redistributable as "shareware" (for a $20 donation) and was
developed inbetween versions of Distant Suns.
This version incorporates a number of bugs fixes that caused it to fail on ADOS 2.1.
"And we thank you for your support".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Geotime_m
Geotime_m will display a map of the earth showing the current day and
nite regions. The shadow will scroll across the map in real time.
This program was inspired by "Geochron", the beautiful, illuminated large wall
map that costs around $4 million bucks (actually, about 2 grand).
It is started in the traditional double-click icon method. For those who
despise workbench, it may be started up from CLI by typing
"geotime_m -f coast2.sm.bin".
City and country names are read from the file "gtnames.dat". Each
entry requires 3 lines in the following format :
name
lat long
time_zone
West longtitude is negative, East is positive. The time-zone is the value
the must be added to your time to equal Universal Time. Most almanacs should
have timezone entries for major cities.
Here's a sample entry :
.San Francisco
38 -122
7
.Seoul
37 127
-9
.London
51 0
-100
Time zones are floating point values since some zones are fractional hours.
(The timezones in the sample file may not be correct due to the uncertainties
of Daylight times around the world).
Each name will automatically be followed by a clock showing the time in
24 hour mode. Using a time-zone value of "-100" (as in the London entry)
will prevent the clock from being displayed to avoid excess screen clutter.
The period before the name is used to more clearly pinpoint the location.
The star-like sprite shows the "sub-solar" point, the point on the Earth
directly under the sun.
There are a couple of options you may change by use of the Workbench
Icon "Tooltypes" facilities. These are used to pass startup information on to a
program. Click once on the icon, then select "info" from the workbench
menu. You will now see the "Info" window displaying all sorts of curious
attributes about it's associated file. Near the bottom is the "TOOL TYPES"
string gadget. Click on the arrows, and you see 4 different startup options.
"GLOBEDATA" tells the program where to get it's map data file. For Geotime_m
there are two files, "coast2.sm.bin", and "coast.wb.bin" (used for the
workbench version below), so you don't need to touch
this unless you move the datafile over into another directory. Next is the
"TIMEZONE" argument. This is the timezone for your location, and is determined
the same way as all other timezones. The program uses this to convert the local
time on your system's internal clock to Universal time. It is currently set up
for Pacific time. You may also change the landmass colors using "LANDCOLOR".
The following 3 numbers are the red, green and blue components. So if you wanted
magenta land you would type "LANDCOLOR=15,0,15", or all red, no green, all blue.
(The color values go frome 0 to 15). When done modifying the tooltypes, click
on save. You may want to open the info window one more time to verify that your
numbers were correctly recorded, as I ran in to some problems in this regard.
NAMEDATAFILE lets you specify the name of the file to contain the location
names.
Geotime_m requires the use of a special font, "flow_thin". In order to
install the font, open a cli window and type "execute gt:font_install".
There are a couple of menu options that allow you to toggle on/off the
clocks, names, and a clock in the menubar.
---------------------------------------------------------------
geotime_m_wb
This is a Workbench version of Geotime_m. It has several other options
to let you optimize it's operations for the Workbench environment.
I elected not to support the normal sizing gadget for several reasons. So
I permit sizing via both a menu option and Tooltype. There is a menu-item
which will let you toggle between "small" and "large" sizes. The small
size is fixed, but the large size may be specifed by the use of the
Tooltype "LARGE_MAG" (for "Large Magnification"). Mulitplying the small size
with this value will give you the large size. So for a map twice the
small size, you would use "2.0". This SIZE Tooltype says what size the
map should open. If LARGE, you will get the large size at startup, otherwise
it will be small. Do not try to make the window open up larger then your
workbench, it could be uncool.
TOP_EDGE and LEFT_EDGE are the pixel offsets from the edge of the screen
the window will open.
SHOW_NAMES and SHOW_TIMES will turn on the names and times.
GLOBEDATA specifies the datafile to use for the map.
There are several additional tooltypes to let you specify the
color selections to use. Each of these is followed by a value which
gives the color number to use. Use the workbench color option to determine
how your own colors are mapped out. The color furthest to the left will be
"color 0", the next is "color 1" and so on. Under 2.0 when you can have more
then 4 colors in the workbench, you may want to set colors 4 and beyond to
values which will look more like water and land. Especially since the
new workbench color scheme will give a fairly dull looking display. You can
add more colors by using the "colors" slider n the "screenmode" preference
tool. The default colors are configured to the workbench 2.0 2-bit (4 color)
configuration.
The color tooltypes are : LANDCOLOR, WATERCOLOR, SUNCOLOR, TEXTCOLOR,
LINECOLOR and SHADOWCOLOR.
As with the larger map display, the sun's "subsolar point" is marked, this time
with an asterisk, whose color is set with the SUNCOLOR tooltype.
In addition to the Tooltypes, there are commandline options which may be
used should you want to start the program from your startup-sequence.
-f <file> : lets you pass the name of the data file to use.
-nf <file> : namefile, the file to use for the location names
-tz <value> : value is the timezone
-land <col> : land color
-water <col>: water color
-sun <col> : sun color
-text <col> : text color
-line <col> : line color
-shadow <col> : shadow color
-names : display the names
-times : display the times
-leftedge <value> : distance from the lefthand edge in pixels
-topedge <value> : distance from the top edge in pixels
-large : open up map using the large size
-mag : magnification value based on the small size, must be before
the -large option
So if you wanted to start the map up using the large size, 2.2 times the
size of the smaller version, 20 pixels from the left, 12 from the top, in
the Pacific time area you would type :
geotime_m_wb -f coast.wb.bin -leftedge 20 -topedge 12 -mag 2.2 -large
If you are running with limited memory, you may want to use the smaller
"coast.wb.bin" database, which is about half the size for the full screen
map, geotime_m. This contains only half of the data points of the large giving
less resolution. Under most cases this will not be noticible.
Note that the smaller size of the Workbench map means that you probably
can't use the same name file you would for geotime_m. So you will likely
want to use a different version with fewer names.
Geotime_m_wb will update the shadow once every 5 minutes, and will work
in both interlaced and non-interlaced screens.
---------------------------------------------------------------
geotime_g
Geotime_g will depict the earth as if you will an astronaut orbiting about
300 zillion miles up. The earth's shadow will be correct for the date and
time, and will advance as time itself advances.
Start this up via the icon, CLI or startup-sequence as mentioned above.
At startup you are in "orbit" mode, in which the viewpoint in effect
"orbits" around the planet. (otherwise it would be a really boring display.)
Geotime will work in both interlace and non-interlaced modes. Although
it looks the niftiest in Hi-res interlace with dropshadow.
As with Geotime_m_wb, there are several Tooltype required. The only different
one is "PRIORITY" which lets you set the priority of the task. The value
must be between -128 to +128. Higher priorities will give you faster updates
however. The default is -100. By setting a priority of -20 you can about
double the speed of the updates.
The LARGE and LARGE_MAG options work as above as well as the sizing
menu-item. Due to the complex structure of the coastlines, the small
size of the globe on a non-interlaced screen will not work correctly.
(Plus it just doesn't look all that hot).
As above, Geotime_g has several color setting options : WATERCOLOR, LANDCOLOR,
TEXTCOLOR, SHADOWCOLOR, LINECOLOR and SPACECOLOR. The SPACECOLOR is specific
to this program and specifies what color the regions around the globe should be.
And as above, these may all be specified via the same command line arguments,
with the addtion of -space.
Notice that the globe and map use different format files so don't try to
interchange the two.
Geotime_g has the same command-line options as above, with the extra
"-pri" choicee to set the priority.
If the globe is not circular, your monitor may need some adjustment.
It may take an update or two for any changes in the settings window
to take affect.
Geotime_g has several menu options. . .
System menu
In the systems menu, "settings" will allow you to set some basic
information needed. Timezone is the number of hours which you need to
add to your local time to arrive at Universal Coordinated Time (the old
"GMT"). +7 is good for the SF Bay Area.
View lat : sets the viewer latitude. Defaults to 0 degrees. (dd.mm format)
Setting this positive will put you above the equator when looking
at the globe.
View long : sets the viewer longtitude. Defaults to 0 degrees. This advances
5 degrees each update while in orbit mode.
Lat : user's latitude. Put your home's latitude here for the "location"
highlight option.
Long : user's latitude. Put your home's longtitude here.
Save : This will save all of your settings to a file, "geotime.dat".
If you make a mistake, the screen will flash a bunch of times and you won't
be able to leave the requestor.
The latitudes go from -90 to +90 degrees. Longtitudes go from 180 W to 0 to
180 E. So for instance, the longtitude for San Francisco, 122:27 degrees
West, would be entered as "122.27 W".
Neat Stuff menu
Highlights : "Continents" will put an outline on the land masses.
"Location" will put a "*" at whatever location you specify in
the settings window.
Indicators : "Clock" will display the current date and time, while
"legend" shows how the sunny side is colored vs. the shaded side.
Mode : This lets you toggle between the orbit/hover rotational modes.
"Orbit", the default, presents the planet to you as if you were
orbiting around in a very fast spacecraft from West to East. "Hover"
puts you above a fixed point specified by the view lat/view long
entries in the settings window. Hover is a really dull mode.
Shadow : "Shaded", the default, gives you a shadow tint, while "black" will
completely blacken the shadow to more closely mimic the view from
space.
Size : "Large" will expand the window to a size X times larger then
the fixed "small" size (note that the small size will not work
right on a non-interlaced screen).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Misc
The data used contains about 3000 points culled from a 6000 point
database. (I may release the larger one sometime, it doesn't look that much
better on the globe, but it is quite nice on the map).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
(Warning! Warning! The following is an unabashed commercial announcement!)
If you do enjoy this program, you may want to take a look at something else
I've done. It's called Distant Suns ,
and is an astronomy simulation. It will display up to 255,000 stars along with
planets, asteroids and comets.
Distant Suns has won an award in the May, 1988 Consumer Electronics Show
for the most innovative Educational Program of the Year as well as The 1991 Commodore Developer's Choice award.
A recent review in Sky and Telescope magazine called Distant Suns "powerful and
visually stunning", and many users write in to me saying things like
"at last, a program that justifies my Amiga", or "Wonderful!".
Distant Suns is not meant just for folks with a telescope, but for anyone who
has ever wondered about what's up in the night sky. (As a matter of fact,
only a handful of owners stated they had a telescope. But those who do
love the program).
So, when you're tired of exploring fictional universes, give the real
one a shot, I think you'll enjoy it.
(End of the unabashed commercial announcement!)
***********************************************************************
Send comments to : Mike Smithwick, 25215 La Loma Drive,
Los Altos Hills, CA 94022