Celestia Forums

Celestia v1.2.5 crashes immediately after opening the display window.
No images are drawn.

Celestia v1.2.4 works OK. Running the initlal view of Io (with only Planets enabled) full screen at 640x480, the image of Io can be rotated at only about 5fps, but it does work, unlike 1.2.5.

This is on a vanilla WinXP Sp1 installation
with an Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200
usiing the drivers provided by Microsoft as part of the XP Sp1 distribution, not those provided by Nvidia.
The OpenGL library information returned by v1.2.4 is below.

It'd be nice if one could tell Celestia to avoid the newly added OpenGL function calls causing this crash. Although some of the new display features wouldn't be available (e.g. specular lighting and pixel and vertex shaders), presumably many other new features would be usable. This might also help avoid some of the problems seen with older graphics cards.

===================
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation

Renderer: GDI Generic

Version: 1.1.0

Max simultaneous textures: 1

Max texture size: 1024



Supported Extensions:

GL_WIN_swap_hint

GL_EXT_bgra

GL_EXT_paletted_texture
=================
A really short list

Background: I'm home sick today, and in a fit of rage at all the accumulated cruft, restored my system from an early pre-SP1 backup and then installed SP1. ("only" ~60MB of download *choke*) I happened to see an nvidia driver go flitting by in the list of files being installed and was surprised to see the system reboot to 800x600 when I had been running in 640x480. (I'll be trying the Detonater 40.71. beta shortly.)

selden wrote:Celestia v1.2.5 crashes immediately after opening the display window.
No images are drawn.

Celestia v1.2.4 works OK. Running the initlal view of Io (with only Planets enabled) full screen at 640x480, the image of Io can be rotated at only about 5fps, but it does work, unlike 1.2.5.

This is on a vanilla WinXP Sp1 installation
with an Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200
usiing the drivers provided by Microsoft as part of the XP Sp1 distribution, not those provided by Nvidia.
The OpenGL library information returned by v1.2.4 is below.

It'd be nice if one could tell Celestia to avoid the newly added OpenGL function calls causing this crash. Although some of the new display features wouldn't be available (e.g. specular lighting and pixel and vertex shaders), presumably many other new features would be usable. This might also help avoid some of the problems seen with older graphics cards.

Your crash isn't due to any new OpenGL features . . . At least, I'm pretty sure that it's not. There is an issue with the multitexture extension on some Linux systems, but that's not what's happening here.

===================
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation

Renderer: GDI Generic

Version: 1.1.0

Max simultaneous textures: 1

Max texture size: 1024



Supported Extensions:

GL_WIN_swap_hint

GL_EXT_bgra

GL_EXT_paletted_texture
=================
A really short list

This is your problem . . . You've got the crappy Microsoft OpenGL driver, which is either rendering in software (which would explain the 5fps frame rate) or using Direct3D for rendering. In either case, you really want to get the nVIDIA driver.

Background: I'm home sick today, and in a fit of rage at all the accumulated cruft, restored my system from an early pre-SP1 backup and then installed SP1. ("only" ~60MB of download *choke*) I happened to see an nvidia driver go flitting by in the list of files being installed and was surprised to see the system reboot to 800x600 when I had been running in 640x480. (I'll be trying the Detonater 40.71. beta shortly.)

You've got the right idea . . . Get Detonator 40.71. If for some reason it doesn't work, go back to the 30.82 drivers (though I've had good luck with 40.71.) Whatever you do, get rid of that MS OpenGL driver. I'll still try and track this bug down--even though Microsoft's OpenGL is crappy, there's no reason Celestia should crash.

--Chris