Celestia Forums

So, somehow I've got extra lines showing up when I display orbits for planets.

They are straight lines within the orbit's elipse, stretching from the point where the planet is to different spot on the orbit line, about 1/8 to 1/6 of the way around the circumference of the orbit. They appear to scale in proportion to the size of the orbit.

They look like some kind of math-related thing. I think that they showed up after I ran a celx file, but I'm not sure which one did it, and I can't find an option in the menu to turn it off, nor can I locate anything in any of the scripts that I've run that appears to do turn on any option that might do this.

I've searched the forum and documentation, but have found no reference to these lines anywhere.

If someone could tell me anything about these (especially how to turn them off!) I'd appreciate it. celx code is welcome as a solution.

Thanks

You have a buggy graphics driver and need to install the most recent one for your card. You should be able to download it for free from the manufacturer.

But I've got another machine here, same OS, same version of the driver, same version of Celestia, and the lines aren't there. In searching the forums for a solution, I've seen several posts about buggy drivers causing gaps in orbit lines and the like, but that's not what's going on here.

These lines look like they're meant to be there. They don't look like errors. The orbit lines themselves are fine, they just have this extra line that looks like the result of some kind of trig function.

Is the antialias selection enabled in the Render menu? Try toggling it to see if it makes a difference. (e.g. type a Ctrl-X) That particular anti-alias selection is only for orbit paths.

I could swear I read a forum posting that claimed that extra "orbit lines" were eliminated by updating the driver. Of course, I can't find it now.

I did find a posting that suggested that it might be related to 'smooth orbit curves', by which I think is meant the orbit anti-alias feature.

OK... turning off anti-aliasing did fix it. I guess it was a glitch, after all :-/

On my the other machine with identical software, anti-aliasing didn't cause this problem. Weird. Guess it's just the type of video card (they're similarly-powered but non-identical Nvidia cards)

For the record, here's the lspci output for the one with the problem:

nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] (rev c1)

Just in case anyone wants to know.