Celestia Forums

I've built a new prerelease package for Windows:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/~claurel/celest ... .0pre2.exe

A lot of bugs in 1.5.0pre1 have been fixed, and a few new features added:



--Chris

Chris,

I've just recompiled Celestia, few minutes ago, and tested it. It's worst than before ! The star are now a complete disaster ! They are looking like a dull glowing orb, without any atmosphere, and the star texture is, well, almost inexistant. The glow effect is still disappearing in an abrupt manner, if I move away from the star, and there is still a huge problem with the albedo of all objects around the star. And the orbital paths problem with "holes" is still there. I'm very disappointed of this version.

Cham wrote:... The glow effect is still disappearing in an abrupt manner, if I move away from the star...

Cham, what render path are you using?

Chris, have you committed your last star code (from dev list)? because I don't have anymore this behavior using it (in older render paths)...

ElChristou wrote:Cham, what render path are you using?

I'm always using OGL 2.0 render path.

Cham wrote:Chris,

I've just recompiled Celestia, few minutes ago, and tested it. It's worst than before ! The star are now a complete disaster ! They are looking like a dull glowing orb, without any atmosphere, and the star texture is, well, almost inexistant. The glow effect is still disappearing in an abrupt manner, if I move away from the star, and there is still a huge problem with the albedo of all objects around the star. And the orbital paths problem with "holes" is still there. I'm very disappointed of this version.

A few points:

- I intentionally removed the atmospheres, because I think that stars look better without. It also makes eclipses look better.
- I worked hard to eliminate all the abrupt changes; I'm puzzled that you still see one. Which star mode?
- The glare texture is being overlayed on the star, washing out some of the detail in the star texture. Personally, I think that this is an improvement.

--Chris

chris wrote:- I intentionally removed the atmospheres, because I think that stars look better without. It also makes eclipses look better.
- I worked hard to eliminate all the abrupt changes; I'm puzzled that you still see one. Which star mode?
- The glare texture is being overlayed on the star, washing out some of the detail in the star texture. Personally, I think that this is an improvement.

Sorry, I strongly disagree with all this. To me, this is a strong downgrade ! The stars are looking fake, now.

I'm using OGL 2 and stars as points (more realistic).

Do you really think this is better ?



It looks lame to me !

This is the planets, as seen far away. They look like brighter than the sun itself. There's a huge problem with albedo with any objects (this problem isn't new. It occured with most versions of 1.5.0) :

Cham wrote:This is the planets, as seen far away. They look like brighter than the sun itself. There's a huge problem with albedo with any objects (this problem isn't new. It occured with most versions of 1.5.0) :

It's only a problem with point stars, I think. The problem is that stars, but not planets, get rendered as points. I think that changing the code to also render distance planets with points should fix the problem.

--Chris

I'm getting a similar problem with all star renderings. Here's an URL showing the star glare disappearing abruptly :

cel://Follow/Sol/2006-12-06T16:39:23.65 ... 79&lm=2048

Just move a bit, and the glare disappear completelly.

Here are two snapshots, with info on the left corner :

Sometimes you just can't win for losing...

1. Unfortunately, on my system at work, Celestia 1.5.0pre2 is once more showing the "white spot in the middle of the star" syndrome and otherwise no glare effect at all. I agree that Planetary albedos look way too bright.

This is with Scaled Discs and OpenGL 2.0 render path:



The Sun is in the left pane and the Earth and Moon are in the right pane, not a double star

2. Eclipses cause the Earth to be drawn red (shader code error: this was reported for pre1, too).

It seems to me that an acceptable short-term workaround would be to automatically disable cloud shadows when Celestia otherwise would draw a planet red.

System:
2GB 1.86GHz E6300, WinXP Pro SP2
128MB Quadro FX 550, ForceWare v91.36
Celestia v1.5.0pre2

Question: how long before the new atmosphere code will work for planets with 2 suns? Just curious.

Probably a minor thing in the face of what everyone else is talking about, but in the Pluto system I see only Charon and Pluto, and neither of the two new moons.

...John...

Dollan wrote:Probably a minor thing in the face of what everyone else is talking about, but in the Pluto system I see only Charon and Pluto, and neither of the two new moons.

That's odd . . . Is the file numberedmoons.ssc present in the extras folder?

--Chris

No, it's not: it's missing from pre2.

[edit]
It also was not included with v1.4.1Final or v1.5.0pre1.
[/edit]

About the Sun,

With this version, the Runar Thorvaldsen's texture does not work well

selden wrote:No, it's not: it's missing from pre2.

[edit]
It also was not included with v1.4.1Final or v1.5.0pre1.
[/edit]

Ah that's right--this file never has been in the standard distribution. Not a problem then. I actually don't want to include it until there's a way to filter out the clutter of tiny moons.

--Chris

Cham wrote:I'm getting a similar problem with all star renderings. Here's an URL showing the star glare disappearing abruptly :

Just move a bit, and the glare disappear completelly.

While I can see the change in the glare, it is nowhere near as dramatic for me as it is in the pics you posted.

Though I voiced this at least once previously in the User forum, I'll do so again now that it's come up here. Though I appreciate that having the halo's makes it easier to see small objects, I really dislike the unnatural look the halos give things.

I'd like to see things shrink to pixel size as they actually get that small, and then swap to using a variable degree of transparency as they shrink below pixel size. Ending when they are less than 1/256 of a pixel, when they would become completely transparent (presuming the cutoff went linearly, though that may be inappropriate for realism).

For now, can an option please be added to turn halos on/off ?

I put forward some essential criticism of Chris' new star rendering before it's coding even started.

Here is a reminder

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 30&start=0

I think the physics should be cleared up among people who understand these things before the coding takes place...

Bye Fridger