Celestia Forums

I've been a Celestia user on and off. The first time I used this program around 2003, my computer was on Win 98, PII, 128 MB RAM. It was slow, but rarely crashed. After that it was changed to a Win XP (Currently SP2), PIV 1.7 Ghz and 256 MB RAM. IIRC, I used to play with Celestia in Full Screen mode with this configuration. But all of a sudden it started to crash when I switched to full screen (either Alt+Enter or through Display mode), and it still does - I don't quite remember if this started happening immediately after I switched to XP. At at all times I've been on an S3 graphics controller (I agree; quite useless for running something like Celestia, but it was satisfactory ). After many months, I decided to try Celestia again and downloaded v1.4.1 yesterday. I hoped to see it in full screen (by some miracle!), but couldn't. I updated the driver(ProSavage DDR 420-430) to the latest and the last (?) version, and it still crashed when I switched to full screen.

I searched for a solution in the archives, and a couple of poeple had mentioned about adding --fullscreen in the Target field in the properties. I did that and Celestia opens in full screen mode (800x600), although my monitor is 1024x768x32. Even with that the picture shakes a lot, or is not rendered properly, and the the program slows down.

So, there's my report. Is my graphics controller not suited for the program?

Thanks,
Navneeth

P.S. While posting, does the forum switch to the default phpBB skin?

Navneeth,

Please read the Preliminary User's FAQ, which is a "sticky" near the top of the Users Forum.

As it explains, the very first thing you have to do is upgrade to the most recent release of the graphics drivers for your card. If that doesn't help, your only option is to downgrade the functions that Celestia tries to use. When --fullscreen is specified, Celestia uses whatever resolution has been saved from the last time it exited from fullscreen mode. Since it crashes without saving anything, it runs in the lowest resolution.

Unfortunately, however, S3 graphics chipsets and drivers are among the poorer ones, which is one of the reasons they're not explicitly mentioned in the FAQ.

Which "skin" you see is up to you. It's one of the settings in your Profile. Select the Profile link above.