Please notice that I'm not an expert whatsoever, so my comments are just the ones of an admirer of the program.
First of all, a few comments to the overall impression:
Several huge advancements since the may version are noticeable. The program loads faster and runs faster.
It took me some while though to disable Cloud Shadows - in a version about one week old, this lead to a very strange behaviour of Celestia*, in the current version it leads to an immediate shut down of the program.
At first sight, I thought that the view of Earth has lost some of its crispyness and that this was a bit disappointing. But after a minute or so, I realized that it looks much more like the pictures we have from space and that the new atmosphere code is indeed extremely well done. Especially when near to the surface of Earth, it looks so realistic and beautiful to look towards the edge of the sphere, seeing the landmasses disappear in the haze of the atmosphere.
The very nice galaxy rendering is nothing new anymore, but it looks like the view of the milky way from inside is now much better. Also, the possibility for custom templates for each galaxy is great to play around and I must admit that it's much more difficult than I thought before I tried it. I would really like to see the possibility for custom coloring.
Now for the downsides. I don't know which of the points that I will mention are bugs and which are just features that don't make sense to me, please appologize if I mix things that would have to been looked at separately and in another forum:
- Surely a bug is the Cloud Shadow bug i wrote about above. If needed, I can give more informations about it. But maybe it's already a known bug.
- Several bugs are reported in the forum like the glowing moons and the strange behaviour of the glow around the sun. I know "glow" is not always "glow" and maybe I use the wrong words, but for a normal user, the aprupt changes of that glowing halo depending on distance make no sense. Only when far enough the sun looks beautiful, like all the other stars. The new star rendering is really fantastic when looking at distant stars.
- The sun is really not very satisfying. When looking from Earth towards the sun, it looks very angled. When nearer to the sun, it gets better of course. When more far away, the glowing halo makes it better, too. Just from Earth distance, it looks very bad. Only with Antialiasing set to 4, it is OK. I made a screenshot on an average look from Earth. Sometimes it looks even more angled than on this picture, at least here the sun is symmetrical:
- Sunspots get brighter when you look directly on them. Only towards the edge of the sun they get darker again. I don't think this is realistic. Generally, glares and halos in the current version intensify light that is behind them rather than damp it. Per example, the milky way gets brighter behind one of these glowing moons.
- The magellan clouds look too bright from Earth. Galaxies generally look to bright. I do like the possibility to augment the light from galaxies by pressing ")", but I would also like the possibility to darken galaxies to a value near to zero. I would like to have the possibility to fade the galaxies in and out rather than having them exploding out of nowhere when enabling them.
- The orbits look very well, but the behaviour is somewhat disturbing. When I fly away from the Sun with comet orbits enabled, they disappear before I can see the whole extend of the comet orbits. Before it was possible to have one Oort cloud comet defined to depict the extend of the cloud. Now I can not even see "normal" comets' orbits as a whole. Maybe the comet orbits should not disappear collectively but individually like the planets' orbits? I would like to be able to see the orbits when distanced by a factor of at least ten to what is possible now. This is a screenshot just before the orbits disappear:
Now comes definitely not a bug, but an opinion: I would prefer stars to be drawn almost only in white when you get very near, having a strong halo that blurs the edges. The halo color of the star should show the color of the star, but the center should dazzle your eyes and therefore be white. This was already suggested somewhere else recently.
All in all, the current version is very promising. As soon as cloud shadows can be fixed, the moons stop to glow and the sun glows in a nice and smooth way, I will be extremely pleased. And there are so many more features mentioned in the forum that I really look forward to
* Info text was not shown any more, galaxies not rendered. Clouds looked distorted and sometimes only the atmosphere of a planet was drawn at all - and only at the border of the planet sphere. This was my first view of the actual development state of Celestia, and I was very disappointed. Then I disabled Cloud Shadows, but had to restart the program to enjoy the new features.
) provides a quite natural impression of galaxies.
