Autostar Tour Tester v1.7 Getting fed up with the noise of my ETX indoors, I decided to write an emulator (of sorts) to test and debug my scripts. I have put a test tour in the emulator so you can see how it works. Try pressing buttons on the hand box - some of them work! To test your own scripts, just cut and paste them into the window below.

The tour goes here: The font size has been reduced to maintain the 80 character width adopted by me for all my scripts. When you are ready, hit the upload button. / // Test Tour // by Janus Astronomical (c)2002 // Don't put this tour in your ETX - it wouldn't like it! / TITLE "Test Tour" AUTO SLEW ON AUTO SELECT TEXT "My Test" "This is a nice long bit of text to make sure the" "scrolling works. It's followed by some more text to ensure that wrapping is" "picked up too." IC 1234 MESSIER 111 CALDWELL 111 NGC 1234 SAO 123456 AUTO SELECT MESSIER 111 AUTO SELECT PLANET "Claire" AUTO SELECT NGC 1234 MOON METEOR SHOWER LUNAR ECLIPSE PLANET "Claire" SATELLITE "Big Sky 1" COMET "Bradshaw 1" DEEP SKY "Fuzzy Blob" CONSTELLATION "The Web" STAR "Red Dwarf" ASTEROID "Earth Bound!" AUTO SELECT USER 02:07:10 +23d27m45s "North 1" "This lies above the ecliptic." AUTO SELECT USER 01:53:32 19d17m37s "North 2" "This lies above the ecliptic" "but has no sign in it's coordinates." AUTO SELECT USER 01:54:38 -20d48m29s "South 1" "This lies below the ecliptic." AUTO SLEW OFF AUTO SELECT TEXT "The End" "I Hope this test made it through!" #END **** Parse results will be displayed here ****

Programming Notes This emulator is proving to be a bit of a challenge! I have re-written the beast a couple of times, and played with the real thing to see how it works. The real Auto star is not very forgiving - as you may have found out. There is logic in how it works, it is just not very easy to work out quite what it is. Parsing It has been straight forward enough to parse the tour (he says), and I decided to do all the syntax and structural checking up front to make the running of the tour less complicated. The checker doesn't do number range validation and one or two other checks to ensure that there are no spurious characters at the end of the lines, but it works well now - I even found errors in a tour which Autostar accepted! Execution I placed the parsed tour into a set of arrays so that I can move up and down the tour freely during execution - just as you can do in reality. The trick is going to be in the interaction between enter, mode, go to and the up and down arrow keys! The arrow keys only adjust scroll speed at the moment, they can't be used to move around the tour. Graphics I'm pretty chuffed about the display! It used absolute positioning and style sheets to format the textarea. It has only been tested in IE6 so I would be interested to hear if it works/has problems in any other browsers. The scrolling was fun - getting it to decide dynamically whether to scroll or not. Version Control // 1.0 Graphics only. // 1.1 Initial functionality added for limited command set. // 1.2 Start again! Order Parsing Added. // 1.3 Scripting for full Command set added. // 1.4 Testing of RA/DEC format made less restrictive (Thanks to Mike Weasner for pointing this out). //      Now handles double quotes and unmatched double quotes in descriptions. // 1.5 Less restrictive with object numbers (Thanks to Ken Martin for finding this one). // 1.6 Moved code into include file (autostar.js) to tidy up a bit! // 1.7 Now changed to a stand-alone page. Copyright The Autostar Tour Tester was written by Jonathan Bradshaw (c)2002 - 2006 It's free to copy and use for non commercial purposes, but credit would be appreciated if you wish to alter and/or republish it. Please give feedback to me at astrojunk@the2bradshaws.com