Celestia Forums

I just loaded the 1.6 package on Windows XP Pro, current patch level. Installation had no issues, starting the program has no issues. On the start up navigation to the sun then earth, the sun showed up, when the transition to earth occurs earth is a flat black area (not proportional for earth). I can go out to the moon and so far any other solar object and they display properly. Select 3, G, and I go back to the blacked out blob. Any idea what the problem is?

The first thing to do is to install the most recent graphics driver from the manufacturer of your graphics hardware. The OpenGL driver provided by Microsoft usually doesn't work correctly. If you recently updated DirectX, that would have broken OpenGL.

What happens when you select the "Basic" render path?
(Type a Crrl-V several times)

What type of graphics hardware does your computer have?
What version of graphics driver is loaded?
(Both of these should be available from the Desktop Properties menu)

What version of OpenGL is available to Celestia?
(Select Celestia's menu Help / OpenGL Info)

The major difference about the Earth's image is that Celestia generates specular reflections for its surface in all but the Basic render path. I suspect that your graphics hardware/driver has bugs in the OpenGL v1.4 routines that are used for that.

Man, you are good! The OpenGL2.0 is where the issue was (default). It works fine in all other modes. I failed to mention XP was a VMWare guest. I am running VMWare Workstation 7.1.2 with the latest version of VMTools. I am running the XPDM/SVGAII drivers which are supposed to be compatible through OpenGL 2.1. There is also an options for WDDM, but I am not familiar with this driver base. Any additional information/insight on the OpenGL 2.0 problem would be appreciated.

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macomberj,

I'd suggest reporting the problem to the authors of the graphics driver you're using. Sometimes they can be surprisingly helpful. (e.g. a few years ago Intel pointed out where Celestia's code wasn't properly compensating for one of their chipsets' limitations.)

FWIW, once it's been installed somewhere, you can copy Celestia's files to another system and run it without installing it, although a few features won't work (like Cel and CelX file associations). When it exits, Celestia modifies Windows' registry, so that might still be unacceptable.

That happened to me maybe twice, then back to normal.