1.2.5 prelease 4

[chris]

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/celestia-win32-1.2.5pre4.exe

Changes:
Menus work again in full screen mode
Improved vertex shader illumination for planetary rings
Better text display from .cel scripts
Added text "flash" messages for many keyboard commands
Fixed Windows Solar System Browser to allow arbitrary depth tree
AutoMag improvements
Ctrl+T to toggle comet tails
And . . .


Now, back to work on Linux and comet stuff so we can release Celestia 1.2.5 final.

--Chris

[jrobert]

Oh WOW!!! I have no words to describe it! You never cease to surprise us, Chris!

[16 of 18]

chris, the d/l is going at about 3 kilobytes a second

i'm on broadband to, i'm not waiting an hour to d/l it

[selden]

Everyone has to be patient.

I suspect Chris may be regretting providing a mirror for starsdb v2

Pings of http://www.shatters.net have worsened from a half-second last night
to 0.8 of a second now. Traceroute indicates that gw.shatters.net's link to the rest of the world is rather thoroughly oversubscribed. Response will continue to get worse until everyone has managed to download all three gigantic files (2x stars + new Celestia)

[billybob884]

very well put selden.

[chris]

Bandwidth problems have been fixed . . . I was able to get 44kb/sec. It turns out that the problem had nothing to do with people downloading Celestia or the star database files.

--Chris

[selden]

Chris,

Thanks for investigating!

[Guest]

I'm sorry, but I don't understand the significance of the screenshot at the top of this thread. The shape of the planet shadow is different, but that's all. Am I missing something, or being ridiculously picky ?

[Rassilon]

Look at the small little hairlined shadow on the front of the planet Thanks again chris your efforts are appreciated....

[chris]

Also, note that varying illumination across the ring. Instead of computing a single lighting value for the whole ring system, I'm using a vertex shader to compute the light at each point on the rings. When the camera is close to the planet, you'll see some realistic variation in the lighting of the rings. Farther away (say, from the Earth), the effect is not very noticeable because the eye is at nearly the same position relative to each particle in the rings. It's a fairly subtle effect, but reproduces what you should see if you were actually flying near Saturn. I wish I could find some good pictures of shadows cast by Saturn's rings. The Voyager spacecraft were flew by Saturn when the Sun was nearly in it's ring plane, so they didn't return any images of broader ring shadows. Viewed from Earth, the rings always almost exactly overlap the ring shadows, because we're (relatively) very close to the Sun, the light emitter. Guess I'll have to wait for Cassini.

--Chris

[Darkmiss]

Thank you chris, been looking forward to this

wow what can I say....... Perfected

Can't find any problems at all, well donr Chris
This baby is ready to go public.

and as you say, the frame rates are up enough for me to use the new stars database too.

My Celestia never looked better.

[erostosthenes]

hey chris, for your next installment, might you introduce whatever it was in that addon for 1.2.4 that made the lunar eclipse for the earth-moon system red?

[LostInSpace]

Could we possibly have the executable only, as per 1.2.5.pre3 ? I don't like to sound like a whinger, it's just the usual slow download/big phonebill problem ( maybe I should hang on for the final, but I always feel like I'm missing out if I don't get all the updates !)

[Troy]

Also, note that varying illumination across the ring. Instead of computing a single lighting value for the whole ring system, I'm using a vertex shader to compute the light at each point on the rings.

A beautiful effect Chris. Now we just need close-ups of rings to look like tiny asteroids and dust...

[John Van Vliet]

In 1.2.3pre 3 the shadow was at the wrong angle, this looks like it is corrected.

[John Van Vliet]

My mistake the planet casts a shadow but the rings do not in 1.2.4/5 pre1,2,3,4,win.xp nVida Gforce 2

[TVTExtreme4]

I have a very BIG problem when running prerelease 4. When i look at saturn the FPS goes from about 50 (at earth and most other planets) to about 0.56 and i get a weird looking ring shadow thingy on top of saturn.
I have a ATI Radeon 8500 with 128mb of DDR Ram and an AMD Duron 750mhz.

To View a Screenshot of my problem go here:
http://tvt.web1000.com/celestia/saturnmessed.html


THANK YOU,
WEB

[TVTExtreme4]

Has anyone else had the problem that i am having?

[HankR]

This exchange from another thread may shed some light on your problem:

-------------------------------------------------------

Paolo wrote:

Yesterday I've downloaded and installed the version 1.2.5 pre 4, but I have experienced some problems with Saturn.
I have an Hercules 3D Prophet Graphics adapter with the ATI Radeon 8500 GPU, an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ CPU and Windows XP.
On my PC With the 1.2.4 version Saturn is visualized correctly with the planet shadow on the rings and a framerate of about 90.

With the 1.2.5 pre 4 the framerate in the solar system remains around 100-120. But when I go to saturn it slows down to 2-3 , and the ring shadow on the planet have discontinuities. Also if I disable the rings shadows the framerate remains very low (3-4). It increases to about 20-30 if I rotate the visualization from an equatorial point of view so the saturn rings are viewed from side.

Chris responded:

I think that I figured out what's going on here . . . Ring shadows were supposed to be disabled for Radeons (actually for anything other than GeForce3 and GeForce4 Ti . . . but see below for more on this). I accidentally left them enabled, causing wacky things to happen. It will be fixed soon--it's a big problem, so I'll try and make another prerelease tonight to correct it.

---------------------------------------------------

- Hank

[Guest]

To Erosthenes:
Since some guys athere should not apparently any problem to implement this addon
in the 125 version, I will do that it is very simple, and put it in the Bruckner site and post a note here.
However since the code is changing very often in this development period, specially the
render.cpp file, the only file I have to modified, I will wait for the official 1.2.5
release.

To Rassilon and Chris:
I did not see any "small hairlined shadow" on Saturn??? when comparing 124 and 125 versions.
(W2000 GEForce 2 GTS/AGP 32 Mo). On the other hand, the variation of the lightning of the
ring is well rendered.
small detail (not specific to Version 1.2.5): apparently, with a french keyboard, the FPS toggle needs to press successive
the key ?, then Alt Gr + ?.
Otherwise everithing works fine. Beautiful work.

MB