Celestia Forums

Hallo,

I am from Germany. My Engish is not so good and my knowledge about computers is very little. So my problem is: after a certain while travelling in the space the progamm freezes or it appears a little window which says: close the programm, there is a problem with the file "tridicdp.dll".

I looked for solution to this problem and I think it has to do with my grafic-card which is not for video games: trident cyberblade ai1 agp (99). Nevertheless, I looked for an driver-update but I didn't find anything.

So can someone help me? For me it's not so important to have the best textures, but wihtout it would be not so nice. But don't forget: my knowledge about computer is very little. If there is no simple solution or at least a simple explanation of the solution I fear I can't use it. Thank you very much! I hope some of you experts have pity with me!

Ferdinand.

Ferdinand,

What is Celestia looking toward when it locks up your computer?

This detail is very important. Sometimes when you tell Celestia to turn, something may start to come into view which will cause a problem.

These kinds of problems usually are caused by certain OpenGL routines which the graphics library tells Celestia that it has but which actually are very buggy. I believe that "tridicdp.dll" is the library used by your graphics chipset. It may have some serious bugs.

Some of the things that often cause problems are
1) the rings of Saturn and Uranus (try turning off "ring shadows")
2) the bumpmaps of the Moon, Mars and Mercury (try removing them from solarsys.ssc)
3) 3DS models of some of the moons and asteroids (I'm not sure which they are. You'd have to avoid looking at them.)

One of the workarounds is to type a Control-V so that Celestia only tries to use its "basic rendering path" instead of some of the more complicated drawing routines.

Does this help?

Just a couple of questions,

1, what make and model is the laptop?
2. When was the last time you did a critical update on the operating system and system drivers.

the error you are getting is quite common with trident laptop vid chipsets, usually happens when something has corrupted the driver files.

You can update the drivers by going thru windows critical updates or the manufactors webpage.

If you wish, email me at kwnitedemon2@yahoo.com i can give you some other things to look at.

After 20 years of building and teching these things, i am pretty versed at some of the most common fixes.