Celestia Forums

Hello,

I have just found this program, and I really think its incredible (esp for free!). I do a lot of teaching about space and this would give a huge amount of realism to my presentations, and excitement for the kids.

I have hit a strange problem on my laptop though. I am running Vista Enterprise Edition (yes, I know - works choice not mine!) which has an Intel Mobile 945 Express graphics chip.

Celestia runs really well in a window, but as soon as I change it to full screen, I get the cross-hair cursor, the menu bar at the top and nothing else. The screen is completely black. I have the latest graphics drivers, and I have tried both 1.4.1 and 1.5.0pre4 and I still have the same problem. Changing the resolution also does not resolve it (although the resolution of the xhair changes meaning it is doing somthing!).

I'm pretty sure its probably my computer rather than Celestia, but if anybody has any ideas please let me know.

Thanks

djbog,

I'm afraid it may be a problem in the graphics drivers. I've seen many complaints about problems with Vista drivers, although the vendors do seem to be gradually improving them.

You might try reporting the problem to Intel. In the past they've been able to determine where Celestia is doing something that their drivers don't support.

Another thing to try is to disable 3D graphics hardware acceleration to see if the software OpenGL routines provided in Vista have a similar problem. Under XP, at least, problems encountered in the proprietary hardware drivers often are not present in the software emulation, although they're slower and have less functionality.

You might also try - as was mentioned to me by other helpful people
here - cycling through the OpenGL render modes. Just hit CTRL-V a
few times to see if you can get a better view that way. On my machine,
I'm afraid that Celestia's current support for OpenGL 2.0 simply doesn't
work correctly, so I have to use the OpenGL with vertex (I think
that's what it's called.)

At any rate, your machine may well be able to render your screens
better under another OpenGL mode, so it's worth a try.

Thanks, Brain-Dead

I tried disabling the Intel drivers and got the same issue with fullscreen. I also tried Ctrl-V to cycle through render modes, but this did not seem to do anything at all in windowed or fullscreen mode.

I did submit the problem to Intel and got their (seemingly random!) automated response back. I have asked them to investigate further and am awaiting a reply.

Thanks for your comments anyway, I guess I'll just have to wait until an updated version of Celestia is available or remove the taskbar and have 'almost' full screen.