Please report problems with the MacOS X version here.

[Matt McIrvin]

Under Panther 10.3.2, when I take a screen shot of a Celestia scene (Command-Shift-3, or the like), I only get the stars, no planets, no bodies ! Only stars. However, if I put Celestia in the background by bringing another app to the front (no windows opened), I can take a full screen shot of the Celestia's scene with all the bodies showing. I can take a picture of a Celestia scene only if I put Celestia in the back. What gives ?

Is there a way, within Celestia, to take a screen shot without using the system's option (command-shift-3) ?

I was having this problem for a while, but it seems to be working better now (under 10.3.3). I'm not quite sure why. If you're still having the problem, you might try using the various options in the Grab application (under Applications/Utilities); I seem to recall having better luck with some of those.

It may be my imagination, but Celestia seems to work somewhat better under 10.3.3 than under previous Panther versions. I was having strange intermittent performance problems and keyboard control lags for a while, but now they're gone.

[StarCrazy]

High everyone. Glad to see a mac community here. A very novice-sounding question here. I bought my G4 mac at the start of 2002..

sys profile:
OSX10.2.8
933MHz
768Mb RAM
openGL1.5
NVDA GeForce 4 MX....I can't for the life of me find whether my graphic card is a 32MB or 64MB card. How could I find this out? Or if you know what the standard card was used for my G4 model, that would be great

Thanx a heap for any help
Chris

[rjcraig]

The new version of Apple System Profiler in 10.3 tells you the card memory size, but not the one in 10.2.6 (which I still have on my desktop; just ran up to check) or, presumably, 10.2.8.

My advice in these situations is always...upgrade your OS!

Failing that, try to find the exact serial number for your card and have a look at the NVIDIA website?

http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce4mx.html

All the new cards have 64 MB...but I'm not sure about early 2002. (Got my desktop in mid-2002, but upgraded the card middle of last year.)

Sorry can't be of more help....

Ron

[StarCrazy]

Thanx a heap Ron,
You're a champ. Your link eventually led me to a page giving me the information I needed....and it's a GeForce 4 MX 64Mb card...cool. Hope to return the favour, one day. As for upgrading to Panther...would be nice...but I'll have to wait patiently for that one.
I'm led to another question for anyone who could help. I thought I had a 32MB card, because I'm having trouble with the graphics for Earth. I'm presuming now it to be because it may be an old graphics card, since I never updated it. At high resolution, if I'm not careful when moving around, the globe begins to 'trip' out, like a messed up jigsaw puzzle of the world map. I haven't read of this effect anywhere and wonder if it's a Mac thing and how I can get around it if I can...after tasting the candy, I want more...high resolution earth blows me away. Any help with this problem would be much appreciated.
I use the following textures for Earth:

earth jpg - 5.3MB (space-graphics)
earth-clouds dds - 2.6MB
earth-spec jpg - 2.8 MB (space-graphics)
earthbump jpg - 252kb
earthnight 32k VT

Also any advice on better, more realistic textures...the space-graphics texture is awesome in alot of ways, but the ocean colour, I believe, is pretty unrealistic. I tried changing the blue colour to a deeper blue, using photoshop, but the file changes to 14MB and still loses quality. I would like to download the Blue Marble texture, but can't find a live link. Any opinions?

Thanx for any help and thanx again, Ron, for your help
Chris

[StarCrazy]

Just a small bug....I seem to have to hide celestia twice 90% of the time as it springs back up the first time I try to hide the program.
System: Mac OSX 10.2.8
Celestia Version 1.3.1-1

Chris

[StarCrazy]

Hi anyone,

I have tried Frank's Activities 1.2 and 2.2 and found that the hyperlinks don't work for me. Tried to get around the problem with Frank and in the end, was advised to post this problem in the bugs forum.

When I click on the hyperlink, the message,

"The address of this site is not valid. Check the address and try again."

Frank mentioned that in windows, during installation, a box must be checked, instructing the computer registry to associate cel:urls with Celestia, not with a web browser. Considering the fact that installation only involves 'drag and drop' in macs, we don't seem to have this option. Is there should be a backdoor way of associating extensions such as .cel with an application?

Thanks for any help
Chris

[Matt McIrvin]

An old question with, possibly, a good answer:

Frank mentioned that in windows, during installation, a box must be checked, instructing the computer registry to associate cel:urls with Celestia, not with a web browser. Considering the fact that installation only involves 'drag and drop' in macs, we don't seem to have this option. Is there should be a backdoor way of associating extensions such as .cel with an application?

Apple's recent security holes involving various oddball URL protocols have spurred new interest in a third-party preference pane extension called More Internet that apparently lets you mess with all the protocol helper assignments in OS X (there really ought to be an exposed interface for this by default!) It might be possible to set the cel: helper with that, or something similar.

I haven't tried it, though...

[HankR]

Matt is correct that what's needed is a means of specifying Celesita as the helper app for the "cel:" protocol. It's really a problem with the web browser configuration rather than Celestia itself.

I didn't realize it until recently, but you can set the protocol helper apps using application preferences in IE (though not in Safari). As Matt mentions, there are also third-party system preference extensions (e.g. More Internet) that can do this.

Unfortunately, currently neither IE nor More Internet allows Celestia to be selected as a helper, evidently because the Celestia app does not have an associated creator code. There may be a simple fix for this, but I don't know it.

I will try to get this working in the next release of Celestia for MacOS X, but can't say how soon that might be. (Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to devote to Celestia lately.)

Keep in mind that although currently you can't just click on cel: URLs, you can drag and drop them onto the Celestia window. It's not as convenient, but it does work.

- Hank

[Matt McIrvin]

Yeah, I tried doing this with More Internet today, and it didn't work.

[Cougar]

Wow, Celestia is awesome. Much better than starry night in some regards. Here's what I've been noticing:

--I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it full screen. The manual says the option is in the Render menu, but there is no such menu in the OS X version.
--Celestia is very unstable. It crashes all the time (hard crashes, that require a restart. Very annoying.) more specifically, when I run the demo and sometimes when travelling to objects
--preferences don't seem to stick, especially high texture settings.
--You can't acess the Star Browser--it is dimmed. Same with a few other things in the same menu.

I'm running the latest version of Celestia on a PB G4 1 Ghz with OS X 10.3.4

[HankR]

Full screen isn't implemented yet in the Mac OS X version. Same for the Star Browser and other dimmed menu items. I don't know why texture resolution doesn't stick; that's probably a bug. I haven't tried using Celestia on 10.3; in my experience it doesn't crash very often on 10.2, but there have been reports of problems on 10.3 with ATI graphics cards.

No progress has been made on the Mac OS X version of Celestia for some time now. Hopefully that will change. (Volunteers welcomed!) It would be nice to see the feature set and performance match the Windows version eventually.

BTW, I believe you can run the KDE version of Celestia on OS X via fink, but I haven't heard from anyone who has tried it.

- Hank

[howard]

Just to let all of you know I run a quite loaded version of Celestia on a G4 1.3ghz powerbook, 1.5g of ram and 64mb vram. I am using OS 10.3.4 and have really no problems. I have all the VT's I can get loaded (you should use VT's, they make the system run smoother), spacecraft... basically every goody I can lay my hands on and even then I seem to be able to run at >15fps full screen for a 17".

What I do miss is using a joystck and using some of the spiffy tricks only on windows. I am looking forward to the 1.3.2 port so I can use .celx and lua scripts. When will we see it?

What is fink? I will give the linux install a shot when I find out what that is.

[ScottB]

Celestia 1.3.1 Mac OS X
As I understand it there is currently no video capture in this release.

Breve 1.9.1 ( Mac OS X 3D simulations of decentralized systems and artificial life ) GNU General Licence has video capture implemented under the file menu. I thought the implementation in Breve might provide a useful prototype for quicktime movie capture.

http://www.spiderland.org/breve/

I understand the limitations on time and resources.
I offer this as constructive research.

Many thanks to all those contributing to its development

[SimonSays]

Cougar, RTFM.

Setup:
OSX 10.3.4
Celestia 1.3.1
Radeon 9000 Pro
G4 MDD 1.25

Hard crashes as others have mentioned when going to a planet. VERY annoying. This is the only app I've used in X that can actually freeze the system. It's hard to say what is causing the freeze since there is no crash log, but I imagine it has to do with rendering the planet.

Other than that it is quite spectacular.

[SimonSays]

After some painful trial and error, I think I've narrowed down the cause of the hard crash to bump maps. Saturn and Neptune render without any problem, Earth is touch and go, and the Moon hasn't worked yet (in fact I wonder if my crashes while viewing Earth weren't due to the Moon passing into view).

Anyone with this problem can avoid it entirely by disabling rendering via the wireframe setting (ctrl+w).

[selden]

If the crashes are indeed due to bumpmaps and specular reflections, another way to avoid them is to tell Celestia not to use vertex shader programs.

You should be able to do this in two different ways:

1. type a Ctrl-V a few times (probably two) so you're using only "Render Path: Multitexture"

2. edit celestia.cfg and remove the # which is at the beginning of the line

# IgnoreGLExtensions [ "GL_ARB_vertex_program" ]

[SimonSays]

selden, both 1 and 2 worked great. No crashes on any object.

Now if only there were a programmer to squash the bug.

[selden]

Simon,

This would seem to be a bug in Apple's OpenGL code for ARB_vertex_program for ATI cards shipped with OSX 10.3.4. They seem to be proud of their "optimizations in the vertex and texture paths" but it seems they may have optimized just a little too much...

If you haven't already, please report it to Apple. They can't fix bugs that they don't know about

[SimonSays]

Do we know for a fact that this bug is limited to 10.3.4 and ATI cards? If I did report this I'd want definite and specific information to give them... and also an address to send it to.

[selden]

Simon,

Sorry, that I don't know. It'd be nice if other people who use Celestia under MacOS would describe their experiences.