Hi Ulrich,

Thanks for the bug reports! I've fixed two: I found out what
was wrong with 'user_loc.txt', and revised things so that Guide
just goes to "normal colors" for locations off earth. (And the
black background is perfectly realistic for airless planets and
satellites anyway. Rendering the skies of Mars, Venus, Titan,
etc. can wait; I don't think there is much demand for that feature.)
You will see these fixes the next time I post an update (pretty
soon, I hope; I'm working on fixing the printing problems
that some have reported.)

Regarding disordered mark files: I don't know what's going on
there. I should mention that when Guide generates, or re-generates,
that list, it keeps the first two lines ("Factory Defaults" and
"Initial Settings") at the top. Everything else is sorted. If
you revised 'marks.nam' by hand, you could indeed get some odd
behavior: the top two lines would stay where they were, and
everything else would be sorted. Perhaps that's the behavior
you're seeing?

"...a better coastline..." Noted. It's been a while since I
went out looking for geographic data. (The current dataset has
several problems. It had the old boundary between East and West
Germany, which gives you an idea of its age. I was able to
suppress that, but I still lack boundaries within the former
USSR. I'd also like to find one "clean" enough that I could
draw countries and water as filled areas, so that water could
be blue.)

"...The sunset shadow fails by roughly 90 km..." True. (For
those wondering what Ulrich is talking about: there's an undocumented
ability to toggle Guide into geographic mode, showing the area
that is sunlit plus three bands of civil, nautical, and
astronomical twilight.) The bands delineate places where the
(unrefracted) center of the sun is at zero, 6, 12, and 18
degrees below the horizon; the last three figures correspond
exactly to the definitions of the three types of twilight, and
those bands are just fine. The "zero" one needs to be tweaked
to land at -.8333 degrees, which would correspond to the top
of the sun being just below the average refracted horizon,
a time also known as "sunrise/sunset".

"...How can I start Guide with showing WEST and current time."
It should always start at the current time. Is that not happening?
What time do you get instead?

It's not well-documented, but Guide does have some command
line switches:

http://www.projectpluto.com/random.htm#command_line

This doesn't include the ability to set a starting alt/az,
though. I can probably find a simple way to do that. (Though
it'll wait until this update becomes "final"!)

-- Bil