Celestia Forums

I am absolutely astonished!
I have an Athlon XP 1800,512 MB RAM DDR333(working at 266 Mhz) and a Geforce FX 5700 128 MB and my program have constant lags specially in scripts and whenever I increase time speed,the frame rate dips very much.Does it mean that Celestia needs 1gig ram?
I am using 4XAA and 2XAF and almost every object bigger than 4k has lags or the frame rate drops to below 5 fps.
Other thing:Does anisotropic filtering has any use in Celestia?

512MB of memory should be enough.

Lags are caused by many things.

I think most lags are caused when Celestia has to decide which objects are visible and whether or not the visible objects are in front of or behind one another. These calculations are done by the central processor and not by the graphics card. Celestia has to decide which objects it should ask the graphics card to draw.

Speeding up time means that Celestia has to do these calculations much more often. It also has to examine more objects over a larger angle, since they may be entering the field of view by the time it is ready to draw the next frame. These additional calculations cause the frame rate to drop off.

Loading textures and models from disk also cause significant lags.

For both of these types of lags, you can reduce them by reducing the number of Addons that Celestia is trying to display and by turning down the limiting magnitude of stars. Calculating which stars, galaxies and Nebulas are visible or obscured is expensive.

Of course, you should make sure you don't have any other programs running on your system while you are running Celestia. Exit from your browser, shut down your mail program, disable any display backdrop image, etc.

Upgrading to a faster processor would help, too.

Danielij,

I was about to write essentially the same as Selden. I am sure that's your problem. Knowing also that you are very keen to install every new add-on, I am convinced that you are presently experiencing an 'add-on overflow'. You could easily test this suspicion by renaming your extras dir and creating a new /empty/ extras dir instead. Then your display should have become much much faster. If not, then something is wrong with your hardware support of the graphics card. In any case, the memory you have both in the computer and in your card should be quite sufficient for a pleasant display speed.

Finally, once my and Selden's suspicion is confirmed, you must critically examine which add-ons you REALLY want to keep...

Bye Fridger

One thing I like to do (and of course this depends on what kind of available hard drive space you have) is to have several different installations of Celestia, one for a different setting or set of add-ons. For instance, I have a "real" installation, where I only put in add-ons that depict real objects, etc. I have a seperate one for my ArcBuilder Universe, one for Babylon 5, Star Trek, Star Wars, a generic science fiction installation, a new one for Jestr's absolutely excellent Stargate add-ons (the Alpha site tasks my system, but I don't care; I hope more like it are coming!), and I am thinking of installing a seperate one for Runar's amazing additions.

But then, I'm also very anal.

...John...

One thing I found that seized things up severely on my system were the Antares nebulae that jestr (I think?) made. These were hollow 3D objects around Antares and one of the nearby stars, and whenever they came into view things got REALLY jerky. As soon as those were disabled I didn't have any problems with "lag". (addons that have a bazillion items - like galaxy catalogues and labels - can also slow things down dramatically).

Dollan wrote:One thing I like to do is to have several different installations of Celestia, one for a different setting or set of add-ons.

John, nice idea. I've tried to do the same thing, but haven't found a real elegant way to organize multiple Celestias. Do you have a different application shortcut on your desktop for each one? Do you have multiple Celestia folders in your Program Files directory, each with a different name?

Just curious what works for you.

Sky Pilot wrote:John, nice idea. I've tried to do the same thing, but haven't found a real elegant way to organize multiple Celestias. Do you have a different application shortcut on your desktop for each one? Do you have multiple Celestia folders in your Program Files directory, each with a different name?

Just curious what works for you.

Basically, I have things organized like this:

-Celestia (root folder)
oCelestia Real 1.4.0 pre6
oCelestia ArcBuilder 1.4.0 pre6
oCelestia Star Trek 1.4.0 pre6

... and so forth. If I decide to use certain add-ons in multiple folders, then I just double them up. For instance, I have several nebula add-ons in both the Real folder and the ArcBuilder folder. It is redundant, and all in all not really that efficient, especially if you need to conserve space, but the computer I run Celestia on has plenty of HD space, so I tend not to worry about it.

Oh, and I definitely like to keep all of my add-ons well organized within the "extras" folder of each installation. That way, when a new version is released, I don't have to hunt all over for the different add-on components, or bother re-downloading them. I can pretty much just click and drag the add-ons to the newer installation, and then delete the old one.

Make sense?

...John...

Cor!...sounds like you guys really know what you're doing here...I keep going back to a earlier version...25 I think..because I like the twinkling stars (a bug I was told). I really need to catch up here!

regards....bh.

bh wrote:Cor!...sounds like you guys really know what you're doing here...I keep going back to a earlier version...25 I think..because I like the twinkling stars (a bug I was told). I really need to catch up here!

regards....bh.

**chuckles** Actually, I only have the Realistic installation running at the latest version. ArcBuilders is 1.4.0 pre5, and I think everything else is still 1.3.2 full....

But you ARE missing out. After all, the double stars that can be shown are spectacular! Especially when you can put a texture on them!

...John...

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Thanks. I'm going to set mine up in a similar way.

hmm I used to have 512mb ram until recently and Celestia worked perfectly, I upgraded to 1gb ram two weeks ago but have not had much change to play with Celestia with is the new amount of ram. Looking forward to 1.4.0 coming out btw.

Thanks,I will solve the problem the best way I can.But I don??t have lots of space in the HD.I have only one 57.2 GB HD half full.

RND wrote:hmm I used to have 512mb ram until recently and Celestia worked perfectly, I upgraded to 1gb ram two weeks ago but have not had much change to play with Celestia with is the new amount of ram. Looking forward to 1.4.0 coming out btw.

it could be that you are running low on hd space and windows is having to use the swapfile more and more. try running disk clean but note that disk clean doesnt get rid of all the temp files for come odd reason. you will need to look in c:\windows\temp and c:\documents and settings\{username}\local settings\temp. Delete everything in those folders including sub-folders.


I new hard disk might be an idea, theyre not too expensive these days.

Is it really safe deleting all temp files?

RND wrote:it could be that you are running low on hd space and windows is having to use the swapfile more and more. try running disk clean but note that disk clean doesnt get rid of all the temp files for come odd reason. you will need to look in c:\windows\temp and c:\documents and settings\{username}\local settings\temp. Delete everything in those folders including sub-folders.


I new hard disk might be an idea, theyre not too expensive these days.