RESOURCE OPTOMIZER

[Andrew Newuser]

does a program exist to dedicate system resources to celestia??? anyone playing deltaforce knows about the optirun programs... it makes the game run smooth. does such a program exist for celestia??? if not... who can make one? email me if you have info... werdnajb@aol.com

[pman]

You can do it in Win XP this way...in Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, find celestia.exe (it needs to be running). Right-click on it and Set Priority to High or Realtime.

HTH;
pman

[Guest]

..same deal for Win2k.

[chris]

Priority high should be good enough . . . I would advise using priority realtime for Celestia (or anything else, unless you really know what you're doing.)

--Chris

[billybob884]

apparently this doenst work for win me, unless im doing something wrong

[pman]

Whoops; quite right, Chris. Priority realtime preempts all other processes, including operating system threads. Most likely your mouse won't work, for instance. Priority AboveNormal is probably the best if you're going to experiment; priority High uses almost all available processor time and might cause problems if you're running other programs in addition to Celestia.

pman

[Thilo]

billybob: if your hardware is simply CRAP you cannot win a flower pot by these measures

[billybob884]

billybob: if your hardware is simply CRAP you cannot win a flower pot by these measures

first of all, my hardware isnt "CRAP", its barely a year old. second, what the hell are you talking about with your flower pot?

[Guest]

is there a way to do this in Win98?

[Don. Edwards]

I don't think Thilo really ment that your hardware was crap. I think what he ment to do was poke fun at your choice of operating system. It is well known in the computer repair and building industry that Windows ME is by far the worst piece of crap that Microsoft has ever pushed on the consumer market. I can speak from experience because I build and repair PCs for a living. If someone wants a new computer from us we load either Win98, Win98SE, Windows2000 Pro. or Windows XP we never load Windows ME. Its just not stable enough for the average user and needs to be constantly tweaked. If someone comes in with a computer with WinME we just hate having to work on it. The first thing we do is see if the computer can handle XP and see they want the upgrade. If they don't we will reload there copy of ME but we make absolutly know gaurante that the system will run any better. Thats just how things are.
You can not set thread priority in any Win9x environment only in the NT based OS's like Windows NT4, Windows2000Pro, WindowsXP HomeEdition, and WindowsXP Pro. I am not trying to sound pro microsoft here because I am not. Accualy I wish there was a port of Celestia for BeOS. It handles resoures very well and is very fast.

[Thilo]

No, actually i did not mean that.

It was rather to tell you, that if you dont have any programs running in the background except celestia, the difference that will be made by measures like setting a higher priority is maybe one frame per second.

And I'm using windows me - only for playing though. Linux is 'a bit more' stable :D

[Redfish]

Well, i don't know about anyone else, but celestia uses about 99 % of my processor time constantly! Don't even have to change the priority. I would like to see that lowered.

[Guest]

there has to be something that can be done... even in a tiny 100x100 pix window it chuggs, and on full screen i get no more than 10 frames per second on celestia with most of the view options turned on. I'm using a 600MHz, 256Mb Ram, 16Mb video card, Win98SE and NOTHING running in the background... i even used Msconfig to disable all the extra windows programs i don't need running. For some freaky reason... my system just doesn't like celestia very much. I don't see these kind of problems in any other programs.

[Don. Edwards]

My guess is its your video card. Just because it has 16mb of VRAM doen't mean you can run Celestia. Your video cards drivers have to have a decent OpenGL IDC written by the maker for Celstia to even work right. It sounds to me like your system is rendering in software mode not hardware mode. You didn't tell us what kind of video card you are using, like who made it and video chipset it uses. This information is criticle if anyone here is to try and give you any help. We are not phycics so we can't see your system and it hareware and make any real educated guesses as to why its so slow. The other thing is when you do get it working you are going to be very limited to the textures you can use because you video card has so little memory. Three years ago 16mb seemed like it was enough for everything but now thats what a basic low end starter system ships with. Your next move I feel would be to get a new or find a good used GeForce2 based video card with at least 32mb or better yet if you get 64mb. I know no one whats here that they need to spend money but really in your case it is almost mandated because of the lack of VRAM. If you REALLY want to use Celestia and see what it can do you are going to have to think these things over and make a plan for an upgrade. I can tell you Celestia is worth spending a little money on for new hardware if you really want use this software. It was Celestia that promted me to go out and buy a new video card. It was costly for me because of what I chose to buy but I wouldn't go back to the my old card unless someone stole my system from me. Otherwise theres nothing else any of us can do for you. Give us more info on your video card and lets see if we can figure this out the cheap way or head for your nearest computer parts retailer for a new video card. But if you do buy a new video card be forwarned to buy an NVidia based card. If you buy ATI you are not going to see all the features Celestia has to offer for a while yet as Chris is still working on making Celestia more compatible with them. The choice is yours.

[John Van Vliet]

I just know that i have to turn S.E.T.I. off because it is set on piority high also .Celistia with stars2a runs just a little jerky (i do nean more ram)