Earth textures overlapping and positioned wrongly [solved]
Posted: 11.10.2007, 02:03
Hi,
I'm using Celestia v1.41 on Linux with nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x with 128MB RAM using the most recent drivers for that card. My computer uses an Athlon 2400+ and I have 757 MB of RAM.
I've been running Celestia fine and having a wonderful time till last night when I downloaded Harald Schmidt's 32K Earth Surface Map and suddenly Earth textures started doing very weird things -- overlapping multiple images in the wrong offsets, and the start.cel animated sequence no longer shows smooth movement to the Sun then Earth, but after a long pause jumps to Earth.
I removed the 32K texture set, going back to my earlier texture (Don Edwards' RealisticEarth-v4-8kDDS.dds), but the problems persisted. Oddly, if I turn off night lights with CTRL-L (I've been using Harald Schmidt's nice, detailed earth-nightlights-hs-32k.ctx) the jumbled textures are fixed... but no night lights anymore. I can cycle through OpenGL display views using CRTL-V to go back to a basic view which doesn't have these artifacts, but also doesn't display night lights, and doesn't show shininess, which is far less than what I had previously.
I commented out and re-enabled the older, standard, lower resolution night lights. It doesn't look as nice anymore but the artifacts are gone. However the program still animates very slowly, with the start.cel still jumps straight to Earth. So something else is the main problem.
One of the star add-ons I installed (hip-obm-stars) gave me hundreds of stars with unrealistic, large, ugly, flares around them. I wondered if they could be taking up precious room in the RAM of my graphics card, so I removed them, but I still have the problems. I'd been gleefully installing lots of add-ons. I've been going through uninstalling and re-installing to I find out what could be affecting this, but I'm hoping that someone might be familiar with this problem and be able to point me in the right direction. Doing the install-uninstall dance for the rest of the day only to find it was a waste of time will be... frustrating.
----
Okay... so I'm officially an idiot.
I'd somehow deleted the folder of 32K Earth night textures and forgotten the main night lights index file needed them. The textures became scrambled I guess, because the night lights index into the texture levels became confused and was using variations of the existing Earth texture and repeating them at different scales over the current Earth texture. This is why the problem disappeared when I switched off night lights. My program is still running way slower than it used to, but I think I'll just work through other files till I find what makes the biggest impact there.
I'll leave this here in case someone else does the same dumb thing and is perplexed.
I'm using Celestia v1.41 on Linux with nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x with 128MB RAM using the most recent drivers for that card. My computer uses an Athlon 2400+ and I have 757 MB of RAM.
I've been running Celestia fine and having a wonderful time till last night when I downloaded Harald Schmidt's 32K Earth Surface Map and suddenly Earth textures started doing very weird things -- overlapping multiple images in the wrong offsets, and the start.cel animated sequence no longer shows smooth movement to the Sun then Earth, but after a long pause jumps to Earth.
I removed the 32K texture set, going back to my earlier texture (Don Edwards' RealisticEarth-v4-8kDDS.dds), but the problems persisted. Oddly, if I turn off night lights with CTRL-L (I've been using Harald Schmidt's nice, detailed earth-nightlights-hs-32k.ctx) the jumbled textures are fixed... but no night lights anymore. I can cycle through OpenGL display views using CRTL-V to go back to a basic view which doesn't have these artifacts, but also doesn't display night lights, and doesn't show shininess, which is far less than what I had previously.
I commented out and re-enabled the older, standard, lower resolution night lights. It doesn't look as nice anymore but the artifacts are gone. However the program still animates very slowly, with the start.cel still jumps straight to Earth. So something else is the main problem.
One of the star add-ons I installed (hip-obm-stars) gave me hundreds of stars with unrealistic, large, ugly, flares around them. I wondered if they could be taking up precious room in the RAM of my graphics card, so I removed them, but I still have the problems. I'd been gleefully installing lots of add-ons. I've been going through uninstalling and re-installing to I find out what could be affecting this, but I'm hoping that someone might be familiar with this problem and be able to point me in the right direction. Doing the install-uninstall dance for the rest of the day only to find it was a waste of time will be... frustrating.
----
Okay... so I'm officially an idiot.
I'd somehow deleted the folder of 32K Earth night textures and forgotten the main night lights index file needed them. The textures became scrambled I guess, because the night lights index into the texture levels became confused and was using variations of the existing Earth texture and repeating them at different scales over the current Earth texture. This is why the problem disappeared when I switched off night lights. My program is still running way slower than it used to, but I think I'll just work through other files till I find what makes the biggest impact there.
I'll leave this here in case someone else does the same dumb thing and is perplexed.