1.3.2 prerelease 6

[don]

Celestia 1.3.2pre6 for Windows is ready

Thanks for fixing the red border / line problem in video capture.

[ElPelado]

I have a Nvidia GeForce 2 mx/mx 400. I shouldnt be able to see "FX render path" right?
And what is the 8x or 4x you talked about???

[Psykotik]

Next time I'd try to help someone, I'll test myself my advices

Elpelado (lo estas de verdad ?), the 4x and 8x are antia-aliased settings. It oblitarates the "edges" effects, wich is very eye candy for the space ships.

Maybe you talk about the anisotropic effect, but here I can't help you; I've never understand what's about, since I've never seen any difference in Celestia switching it on or off... It's supposed to improve the image quality, but that's the theory.

[TERRIER]

And what is the 8x or 4x you talked about???

These are settings for antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, which basically help your graphics card to improve the quality of the image displayed on your screen.

Antialising smooths the edges of an object, so for a good example of this working in Celestia will be that you notice a smoother and less jagged edge to your planets. The smoothness will improve using a higher setting, but it will cost you some of your performance (FPS) as it takes more processing power.

Anisotropic filtering is a way of improving the depth /3D effect of the image, (read more about it here, with this simple explanation);
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition ... 37,00.html
Again the image will improve using a higher setting, but at a cost of performance.

Both these features are supported by ATI and Nvidea cards as far as I know, and the better the card, the more options you will have for each. My Nvidea card allows a range from 2x to 8x, using the latest nvidea 53.03 driver. Better cards maybe can go higher than 8x ?

You can access these settings 2 ways.

First by going via the Control Panel / Display / Settings / Advanced route.

Where you can click on the tab with the name of your graphics card to bring up its settings option menu. Where you can adjust the value you want using the sliders.
see below;


Or, If you have your nvidea settings icon displayed in your taskbar, you can adjust the settings directly.

Here is a screenshot where I am adjusting my Antialiasing settings, see below;


And for Anisotropic Filtering, see below;


Hope this helps ?
TERRIER

PS
I don't use the settings at 8x when I normally run Celestia

[ElPelado]

Thank you, it helped, I know how to change it now.... but it doesnt change anything, i still see the same ugly shadow on teh rings(I mean, the normal shadow we used to see)

[TERRIER]

ElPelado

You won't be able to improve your ring shadows (at present) just by using antialiasing, you'll need to have a geforce FX graphics card. This is what Chris wrote earlier in this thread;

You're correct that antialiasing won't solve the ring shadow problem. It's due to the fact that Celestia uses a 256x256 texture for the shadow. In the next prerelease, you'll be able to set the size of the shadow texture to something higher. But, since you have a GeForce FX, you can get much better ring shadows now. Just press Ctrl+V to switch to the GeForce FX rendering path and you'll see a vast improvement.
--Chris

However for you and anyone else who is wondering, here is an example of what anisotropic filtering can do in Celestia;

Firstly, heres an image of Hubble with AA set to 0, and AF set to 0 (also another setting you can adjust is "Image Setting" which in this case is set at "High Performance");



Next, here's an image of Hubble in the same time and space, using AA set at 0, and AF set at 8x (Image Setting still at "High Performance");



There doesn't look like much difference, but if you look closely (apologies to anyone with less than 20/20 vision) at the solar panel textures, the image using Anisotropic Filtering set at 8x shows them to be much sharper.

Big deal, huh?

regards
TERRIER