Newbie - Earth is a red blob

[bwblackett]

Just downloaded and installed the program on XP.
When run it displays the title then scrolls across to the Earth, but all I get is a red blob, all the other planets/moon etc are the same.
I'm guessing this is something to do with OpenGL not working? My settings are shown below.
I have used other OpenGL programs without any problems.
Any help appreciated.
Brian.

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer: GeForce FX 5200/PCI/SSE/3DNOW!
Version: 1.5.1
Max simultaneous textures: 4
Max texture size: 4096
Max cube map size: 4096
Point size range: 1.000000 - 63.375000

Supported Extensions:
GL_ARB_depth_texture
GL_ARB_fragment_program
GL_ARB_fragment_program_shadow
etc etc

[cartrite]

A GE fx5200 should probably get better results than that. It looks like you need a driver update.
cartrite

[John Van Vliet]

edit 5:34 pm

[chris]

i have been out of the windows game for a bit, 2years, but it looks like you have Microsoft's ( rewrote ,broken , OpenGL disabled , dumbed down ) video driver installed by the Auto updates
Celestia requires OpenGL 2 MS's drives barely ( as in almost) supports gl 1.0
look here at the nvidia web site
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
or go to the download page
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_169.21_whql.html
download the driver and save it to /My Documents DO NOT INSTALL
Reboot IN SAFE MODE
goto add and remove programs remove the video driver it should be listed but MS may have it hidden
on windows i used a program called MyUninstaller to remove software ( I highly recommend it ) it shows programs that Microsoft has set to be hidden so that you can't normally remove them easily
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/myuninst.html
Reboot again IN SAFE MODE
install the video driver you got from nvidia in C:\\NVIDIA
reboot

The Vendor string in the OpenGL Info dump says "NVIDIA Corporation", so this is definitely not the Microsoft driver. It's probably an old version of the NVIDIA driver that's having trouble with the version specifier in the shaders. Ultimately, the fix is still basically what John described: get the latest driver from www.nvidia.com and install it. Personally, I never bother with rebooting into safe mode: just downloading the driver and installing it has always worked find on the computers that I have at home.

--Chris

[bwblackett]

Downloaded and installed new version - it all works now - thanks for all your help.
Brian.