Rendering problem

[Caro]

Hi all,

first of all, I'm sorry if somebody else had a similar problem before, I didn'd find anything with a quick search here.

I occasionally use Celestia on my old laptop for presentation purposes. Until last month, everything worked fine for years, but since yesterday Celestia's standard textures are displayed in this really strange, pixeled way as shown in the attached screenshot. This is independent of the rendering mode (basic, OpenGL, NVidia Combiners). However, when I change to an alternate surface, everything (apart from the cloud layer, which stays pixeled) is fine again.

I thought, well, that's a good occasion to update Celestia from version 1.4.1 to 1.5.1, but the rendering stays the same; so this is apparently a problem with my computer and/or my settings. Any ideas which button I unintendedly hit?

I recently installed SP3 on this machine, but even since this terminated my WLAN drivers, I don't think that this is related to this issue since that was before I used Celestia two weeks ago and everything was fine. Needless to say that I'm not able to update my graphics drivers, since NVidia does not provide any support for them for years.

System: Toshiba Satellite 2430 with P4 2.6 GHz, 1GB RAM, NVidia GeForce Go 420 with 32MB RAM, Windows XP Home SP3

Thanks for your help,
Carolin

[selden]

Is there any chance you accidentally typed a lower-case "r"?
That tells Celestia to try to use the next lower resolution surface texture. It'll flash on the screen which texture folder is being selected.

Typing an upper-case "R" selects the next higher resolution surface texture. Does that improve the image you see?

[BobHegwood]

None of my business here, but I have only my medres folder populated within Celestia. This way, all of the textures I use are already located within the place where they should be for immediate access. In this way, I do not have to worry about the texture resolutions. I know this may not be useful for everyone, but this is the way I keep my Celestia folder organized. The only time I diverge from this is when I'm using alternative textures for High-Resolution VT's.

Just a quick tip from the Brain-Dead.

[Caro]

Hi Selden,

that actually solved it. Shame on me, a look at the manual would have helped... I never used these lowres textures, I didn't even know they were there. I wonder where Celestia saves this view mode in the configuration, since I had the lowres textures, in both the old 1.4.1 version and the new 1.5.1 version, which I installed in a separate folder.

Bob,

your way of having all textures in medres is probably the best for Celestia's standard textures, since I will still probably never use the lowres ones where medres or highres ones are available. I have all my Addons either in the extras folder or in a separate folder called unused, so that I can easily shift them between these two folders. Loading Celestia with all the Addons I have would clearly be too much for the hardware of this laptop.

Thanks,
Carolin

[BobHegwood]

your way of having all textures in medres is probably the best for Celestia's standard textures, since I will still probably never use the lowres ones where medres or highres ones are available. I have all my Addons either in the extras folder or in a separate folder called unused, so that I can easily shift them between these two folders. Loading Celestia with all the Addons I have would clearly be too much for the hardware of this laptop.

Just for your further information here, Carolin, I have textures ranging from 2K all the way up to 8K in my medres folder. My machine can easily handle the higher-quality textures, so I just use these normally.
If I really needed to enable a lower-quality texture because of performance problems, I would just replace the larger texture in the medres folder, and then create an alternative texture if I wanted to be able to view a much higher resolution (and possibly slower) texture.

Again though, I normally don't do things the way they are supposed to be done.