Help: Blank Earth! Blank Spacecraft!

General discussion about Celestia that doesn't fit into other forums.
Topic author
Tetzauh
Posts: 24
Joined: 24.09.2004
With us: 20 years
Location: Tesist?n ( 20.7830°N, 103.4830°W)

Help: Blank Earth! Blank Spacecraft!

Post #1by Tetzauh » 25.10.2004, 17:43

Ok. Here is the thing: I've tried Clestia in 3 PCs now and ...

In the first one (win98), I have to run in Lo-res mode because it can't take anything else... and everything goes well enough. I can see all textures and stuff animation is smooth, ect

In the second one (winXP), I can run in mid res (animation is a little choppy, but well..) BUT I get blank textures on spacecraft. Cassini and Galileo are blank and colorless. Altough they are correctly illuminated lack of color makes it difficult to see its features. The only other funny thing I've noticed is an eroor message on loading saturnrings.png (or so) but I can still see the rings...

In the third one Mid Resuliotion runs sumootly... but Earth Is blank! It's a billiard ball in Space! No other planets seem to be affected and when I change textures to lo-res I can see earth (but what's the point in runnig it like that on such a powerful machine?)

Why does this happen? How can I fix it?

Note: This all happens with the SAME installler for Celestia 1.3.2. and when I say the same I mean the exactly same installation file from the same CD.

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10190
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years
Location: NY, USA

Post #2by selden » 25.10.2004, 17:53

Tetzauh,

You need to tell us exactly what graphics cards are in those systems and exactly what version of graphics drivers are installed on them. Many problems like those you describe are caused by obsolete and buggy drivers.

Some of this information is available in Celestia's Help menu.

Please read the first few Q/As in the Preliminary User's FAQ at the top of the Users Forum. It has more details.
Selden

Guest

Post #3by Guest » 25.10.2004, 19:35

Thank you Selden.

Ok The stats for the Machines are (as specified in properties Menu):

Case 1: Video 88PCI-16, NVIDIA Vanta/Vanta LT

(For cases 2 and 3... I have to check. I will edit this post and also let you know if driver updating solved the problem and where to find the drivers for those cards... just in case someone needs them)

Guest

Post #4by Guest » 15.11.2004, 21:54

This Topic Seems To be as forgotten as the Hulk II Movie, but just for the sake of those future users with similar problems I have to add the following epilogue:

The first machine was an 88PCI-16 NVIDIA -VANTA/Vanta LT card... and the second one was a Trident vido acceletator blade 3D Promedia PCI. Now whether it was the driver or not... I will never know bacuse niether of these video card seem to have an upgrade on their configuration (For the first one there is a link ftp://ftp.jaton.com/vga/VideoNvidia/5664/win9X.exe which seems to be broken and the second one appaers to be out of stock and outdated).

As for the third case... that one is in computer heaven.

By the way the previous guest post is by me, Tetzauh, who loves to delete Cookies.

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10190
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years
Location: NY, USA

Post #5by selden » 15.11.2004, 22:04

Tetzuah,

Have you looked on the Nvidia Web site?

The Vanta is a version of their TNT chipset, and is listed among the cards which are supported by Nvidia's most recent drivers for "GeForce and TNT2"
See http://www.nvidia.com/object/66.93_geforcetnt2_supported.html


You can download the driver from http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
Selden

Avatar
selden
Developer
Posts: 10190
Joined: 04.09.2002
With us: 22 years
Location: NY, USA

Post #6by selden » 15.11.2004, 22:34

Trident sold their graphics division to XGI. Drivers can be downloaded from the XGI Website at
http://www.xgitech.com/sd/sd_download.asp

Select the "desktop" menu item. Blade 3D is at the bottom of the list.

I hope this helps.
Selden

Topic author
Tetzauh
Posts: 24
Joined: 24.09.2004
With us: 20 years
Location: Tesist?n ( 20.7830°N, 103.4830°W)

Post #7by Tetzauh » 07.12.2004, 22:41

Thank you very much selden, I will try the link (altough my computer is in the purgatory right now, It will be a couple of weeks till I can try it). Regarding the NVIDIA Driver, I got it from the manufaturer (well, not quite, their link was dead and hey sent to the righ ine on the NVIDIA site) and it didn't solve the problem. Wonder if it is the computer?

As an update for anyone having a similar problem I SOLVED (partially) the blank planet issue. It seems that big textures are the problem. I went into the Textures/medres folder and rezised the texture to 1024 x 512 (1k) and that was it! I got my planets back. It seems that even if the open GL driver says that it can take up to 2k textures, sometimes it can't, so you just decrease the texture size and you computer can handle it. You don't have to go all the way to low resulotion... usually 1k is Ok. (I specifically noticed this when I tried to install the NASA version of celestia with its bunch of addons, Mars went blank and then I said "What't the diffrence?)

Regarding spacecraft, they're still blank. I can get their color only when I increase ambien light, so i believe that might be a memory problem (some transparency reflecting all light and shading the underneath color) but since spacecraft have to textures I have not treid my trick on them.

Thank you very much again Selden.
"Titan is Ours!" -Starscream


Return to “Celestia Users”