textures - colour transition problems

[Stormyman]

Hi,

I am using Celestia v.1.3.0 on Windows XP.
It bascially works without any problems, the only thing that bugs me is that the textures of several planets seem to have different "zones" of colours. Especially the planets Uranus, Neptune and the Venus clouds. My high res Earth and Mars looks great.
I made a screenshot of Uranus as an example :

I wish my computer could render the colour transitions, but I dont know what is wrong. I have a 64 MB memory NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420. Does anybody have a clue what I have to change in the properties of the graphic card ? Or sth else I can do to solve this problem ?
Greetings,
Stormyman

[JackHiggins]

I get that too - it's not a problem with your graphics card, it's just a bad image. (the originals are jpegs I think!) There are neptune & uranus dds's available somewhere that fix these problems - you may be able to find a link to them on the forums here somewhere.

[Stormyman]

I just dont know why especially my computer has this problems. I saw celestia running on other computers and those planets looked great.

Up to now I couldnt find any uranus.dds neptune.dds or venusclouds.dds , it would be great if someone has a link!

[John Van Vliet]

I am runing win XP with a gforce mx 440 and i cant say that i have noticed it but then again i convert all .jpg to .png

[Buzz]

Maybe it is the colour depth setting. It looks like the image is being converted to a format with less bits per pixel, that is, with a smaller number of different colours. Because the colour gradients are very subtle you do see it with uranus and venus, but not with earth.

[Stormyman]

Well I also have a medres png version of uranus.. ...I made an example of the png texture :

it looks a bit different from the jpg version...but not really better..
I didnt manage to find a dds file yet, which might fix the problem.
At least its cool to know that some figuration of my graphic card geforce mx420 exists, where it looks nice...just wonder what to change....

[Buzz]

Did you check the Render/select display mode settings in Celestia? Make sure it is set to a high colour depth. If that is not the problem, maybe you should upgrade your graphics driver. This often helps!

[Stormyman]

Hi,
the colour depth is high, I also updated my graphic cards driver, but it didnt help.
What I found out is when I start Celestia in Windows Safe mode,
this graphic problem doesnt exist and uranus, neptune etc look great ! Just that in this mode I have no stability at all.
I also installed Nview and it says when I ask info about Celestia that
"tranparency is deactivated because some other application uses DirectX of 3D graphic functions"..... so it might be the fault of some application that is loaded when windows starts.
Just that in the task manager I checked that all applications are closed, and I closed several processes but it didnt help. Is there a way I can find out the guilty program ?
Or it has another reason ?

[selden]

Stormy,

Both of your pictures seem to be screengrabs by some utility of Celestia running in a window. That's reasonable to try to show how it looks, but...

Have you tried running Celestia in full-screen mode?
(hold down the [Alt] key and type the [Enter] key )
Do the colors look any different?

[Guest]

I have tryed several different modes. Full screen, different resolutions, different colour depth...but the problem stays.
The problem only doesnt exist using Windows XP Save mode...but then the program very instabile (of course).

[selden]

Stormy,

One test you haven't mentioned is disabling graphics hardware acceleration.

Display Properties / Settings tab / Advanced button / Troubleshoot tab / Hardware acceleration slider -- set it to None. Then click on the OK buttons to close the Display setup windows.

If the problem goes away then I think you most likely have a broken graphics card. If you still have the problem, then I think some other program is interfering.

[Stormyman]

Selden,

You are a genius ! If I deactivate the graphic card acceleration the problem is indeed gone. Also when I put to only "basic functions" of the graphic card. Unfortunately the program runs very slow without the graphics card.
So probably it is my card broken and only buying a new one will fix it ?

[selden]

Stormy,

I really don't know enough about graphics cards to say for sure, but I fear that is the case. You might try running dxdiag to see if you see similar problems in its DX support. Unfortunately, the cube spins fast enough that it's hard to tell how good the shading is. I dunno if there are any other diagnostics that would be appropriate.

If your card is new enough, it might still be covered by the original warrantee. If you do decide to replace the card, I'd suggest getting something like an Nvidia FX 5200. They're about US$70-$100. Unless you're also a 3D game fanatic, of course, in which nothing less than a 256MB FX 5900 Ultra will do! Of course, they're more like $400-500.

[Indigo]

I had similary situation with planets on Nvida GeForce2 Ti with 64 MB memory. And found a reason: it was bug in old driver for video.

Find new drivers - problem will disappear!

[Stormyman]

SOLVED !!!!

I managed to solve the problem. I was searching for new drivers again and downloaded a complete software packet for my graphic card from http://www.nvidia.de
This software added new menues to the graphic card options.
I am able to change Open GL settings now (I wasnt before).
Somehow colour depth in the Open GL menue was set to 16 bpp...and I changed to 32 bpp. Now all planets look cool !
I thank everybody for the help !
Stormyman