1.2.4 preview Bugs or not Bugs

[Ralf]

Hi,

I'm running the new 1.2.4pre on my PC and now I can travel through the universe, thanks for Celestia and a very special thanks to Chris!

Well, maybe I found some "easter bugs" in Celestia:

If I switch off Asteroids, all Comets switched off, too.

If a moon moves into the shadow of a big planet something strange happens
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic1a.jpg
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic1b.jpg

Landing on Titan and looking upward you can see a "hole in the sky" (I found the same effect on Earth)
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic2.jpg

Orbital lines of objects (ISS, Mir, ...) don't show up in front of a planet
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic3a.jpg
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic3b.jpg

System: Windows Me - Athlon 800MHz - RAM 512Mb - GeForce256 32Mb

With cosmic greetings and Happy Eastern....
....Ralf

[chris]

Hi,

I'm running the new 1.2.4pre on my PC and now I can travel through the universe, thanks for Celestia and a very special thanks to Chris!

Well, maybe I found some "easter bugs" in Celestia:

If I switch off Asteroids, all Comets switched off, too.

This is by design . . . I could make it possible to turn them on and off independently, but since the line between asteroid and comet is very fuzzy (e.g. Chiron), I didn't bother.

If a moon moves into the shadow of a big planet something strange happens
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic1a.jpg
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic1b.jpg

This is due to the fact that shadow textures are only 128x128, so you're seeing some ugly edge artifacts. I could increase the resolution to make the eclipse more realistic, but this would use more texture memory.

Landing on Titan and looking upward you can see a "hole in the sky" (I found the same effect on Earth)
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic2.jpg

This is a known deficiency of atmosphere rendering . . . I'll be revisiting the atmosphere code pretty soon and hope to come up with a better rendering technique.

Orbital lines of objects (ISS, Mir, ...) don't show up in front of a planet
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic3a.jpg
http://www.ralf-schoofs.de/pic3b.jpg

Another known problem . . . It turns out that making depth buffering work for the orbits is a pretty tricky problem. It will have to wait for 1.2.5.

Thanks for the reports . . .

--Chris