1.3.2 prerelease 6

[chris]

Celestia 1.3.2pre6 for Windows is ready:

http://www.spacesim.net/prerelease/cele ... .2pre6.exe

Quick summary of changes:
- Scripts can now be paused with the space bar
- Moons don't appear too bright at narrow FOVs anymore
- New and improved Saturn ring texture
- Better ring shadows (especially on GeForce FX cards)
- LongLat now supported for solar system bodies

The last item demands a bit more explanation . . . In .ssc files LongLat may now be used for solar system bodies instead of just locations. This makes it much easier to locate objects on the surface of a planet. Instead of all the invisible object fuss, you can place an object at 15 degrees north, 53 degrees east with this one line:

LongLat [ 15 53 0.001 ]

The last value is the altitude in kilometers. Make sure that you don't have any sort of orbit defined for the object, as that will override LongLat.

--Chris

[Rassilon]

Were you able to fix the crash on emissives?

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

It's not on the list, but I don't suppose you remembered to add the ability to start Celestia without the stars.dat file, did you?

[chris]

It's not on the list, but I don't suppose you remembered to add the ability to start Celestia without the stars.dat file, did you?

Yes, that 1.3.2pre6 can be started without stars.dat by commenting out the StarDatabase line celestia.cfg. Sorry I forgot that from the list of changes. Another item I forgot to mention is that Christophe made Greek letters show up in star names shown in the completion list.

--Chris

[Guest]

So like haze, even high-end ATI owners won't see updated ring shadows?

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

It's not on the list, but I don't suppose you remembered to add the ability to start Celestia without the stars.dat file, did you?

Yes, that 1.3.2pre6 can be started without stars.dat by commenting out the StarDatabase line celestia.cfg. Sorry I forgot that from the list of changes. Another item I forgot to mention is that Christophe made Greek letters show up in star names shown in the completion list.

--Chris

Groovy. I'll download it tonight and give it a go

[chris]

So like haze, even high-end ATI owners won't see updated ring shadows?

No . . . it's NVIDIA-only for now, I'm afraid.

--Chris

[TERRIER]

Can't wait to download this

What we could really do with now, is a summary of all Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates for all surface positioned objects available.

What exactly, would the .ssc look like, for say the Apollo 11 lander on the surface of the moon, using the new LongLat feature ?

regards
TERRIER

[Rassilon]

Well I went ahead and downloaded the new release and it still crashes on emissives...

I really want to make use out of the new object placement feature...Is there a way to compile that with the code used in pre 2? Or will it be more work than its worth?

[Guest]

Is there an 'exe' only download available for this one ?

[DJ_Night]

Greetings! thanks Chris for this update.

is it possible to smoothen the edges of the ring shadows even more and use higher res?, it would be nice as a option Low/Medium/High quality ring shadows depending on the system.

Please Wait... Loading Image...

[Psykotik]

To smoothen the egdges of Saturn use the antialiasing option ! I can go till 8x, wich is sufficient to get ride of all of egdges

[DJ_Night]

Antialiasing settings 8x at cost of big performance hit on my system, it wont even solve the Ring shadow pixels because of the low res shadows to work with, It also blurs the textures and celestia font-text, Adding Anistropic filtering 8x wont help out much to sharpen.

celestia textures looks better/sharper without nvidia antialiasing. I use alot of 32k/16k highres textures/normal maps, so using Antialiasing slows down my fps alot.

my system: P3 1Ghz. 512Mb PC133 - GF-FX5600 256Mb.

[chris]

Antialiasing settings 8x at cost of big performance hit on my system, it wont even solve the Ring shadow pixels because of the low res shadows to work with, It also blurs the textures and celestia font-text, Adding Anistropic filtering 8x wont help out much to sharpen.

I need to fix the text so that it looks better with antialiasing--I typically run with 4x. 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

[DJ_Night]

thanks alot chris, with the "Render Path set to FX" it now looks very smooth. Great eye candy =)

Loading Image... Please Wait...

[DJ_Night]

I have noticed a small problem. celestia returns to "Nvidia Combiners" every time I start the program and then I have to select "Nvidia FX" again. The setting does not remain.

The "RenderFlags" in the registry is set to "0x00009796 (38806)"

what value should it be to force celestia to start with "FX render path"?

thanks.

[Evil Dr Ganymede]

Yes, that 1.3.2pre6 can be started without stars.dat by commenting out the StarDatabase line celestia.cfg. Sorry I forgot that from the list of changes.

Seem to work fine, thanks!

Though it's kinda weird to be looking at the only star system in the universe (a HIP 400000 binary I made)...

[ANDREA]

Greetings! thanks Chris for this update. is it possible to smoothen the edges of the ring shadows even more and use higher res?, it would be nice as a option Low/Medium/High quality ring shadows depending on the system. Please Wait... Loading Image...

Hello my friends, I have not an FX but a GeForce 4600 Ti 128 Mb, and use the Nvidia settings as follows
Image settings: High Performance
Antialias Settings: 4XS (I have not the FX 8X )
Anisotropic Settings: 8X
The result is about the same.
But in release 1.3.1.1 I have installed the KCelestia.exe file, and here the results:



So, cause KCelestia doesn't work with 1.3.2pre5 (and probably pre6 too, not yet checked), couldn't be possible (and probably easier) to modify KCelestia so that it will work with the new 1.3.2 releases?
Only a suggestion, naturally!
Thank you for your patience.

Andrea

[Darkmiss]

Thank you Chris the new darker ring shadows Look amazing
and My Saturn has never looked better.

I too was wondering how the KCelestia.exe managed to have such a smooth ring shadow too

Looks like Im going to need to get a bigger Video card

---------

For those asking about an exe only version, NO
as you need a new Celestia.cfg file, new shaders, and more...

[don]

http://www.spacesim.net/prerelease/celestia-win32-1.3.2pre6.exe

Nice quick download Chris. At least for me, on DSL.