Celestia Forums

I currently have an NVidia 4200ti video card which is dying, and will be upgrading to a GeForce FX 5700 LE soon. ISTR that there are some extra render paths available in Celestia with the 5000 series - can someone remind me what these are and confirm that I'd be able to access them with this card?

It's the OpenGL 2.0 render path. Right now, it primarily adds shadows for more than two light sources, although not (yet) for more than four.

It's available on all 5nnn cards, even the 5200.

Oh yeah, that was it. Thanks Selden.

I ended up with an FX5500, not a 5700LE. Though it's not the latest card, it's still a vast improvement on my old one (256MB RAM vs 128MB for a start).

So, which render path is the one that has the extra shadows etc? I seem to have Basic, Multitexture, OpenGL Vertex Program, OpenGL Vertex Program/NVIdia combiners, NVidia Geforce FX, and OpenGL 2.0. I didn't have the latter two before, what's the difference between them?

And what's the best way to show off the new light source shadows? I could see planets that were lit up by two stars before - do you mean that now I can see two shadows cast by one planet on another while it's eclipsing both stars (or better yet, two shadow sets cast by rings on a ringed planet?).

Mal,

The OpenGL 2.0 path adds more shadows.
The FX path was an early version of new shadow code that worked only on FX cards like the one you have now. It's deprecated. The OpenGL path does more.

You'll have to do some tests to see just what works when there are multiple suns in the sky. There are some bugs in the code, so please report what you find. As I vaguely recall, some of them are due to the code trying to draw more shadows than it fully implements. This results in error messages from the shader compiler provided by the graphics card vendor. Objects that generate these errors are drawn bright red. The errors are logged in the file "shaders.log". It gets written to the current default directory. E.G it's written to the desktop if you start Celestia from a desktop icon.

I think one problem can be seen if you put a ringed moon in orbit around a ringed planet with more than one sun.

OK, cool. I'll tinker round and see what I can find.

Of course, the irony is that if there are bugs then probably the only person who can fix them is Chris, and he's AWOL. Is there nobody else who can fix rendering bugs?