Celestia Forums

Celestia has been the first program to force me to buy a new graphic card. I'm not a gamer, so I thought I was immune to this kind of expenses. What a fool

So that's 4 weeks I own a new graphic card, a MSI GeForce FX 5600, with the latest brand drivers from MSI (nvidia 44.03).

Exploring ALL the space of Celestia days by days, I was surprised to discover a bug I never seen before (I can't remember exactly, but I think with the first card, a GeForce 2 MX 200, celestia worked correctly).

The bug is I can't see anymore the shade off. The colours change in a unvarnished way, and the result... look at result :

The first exemple, with a Rass' planet :


The second exemple, with a Rass' (again ?) pulsar


I've tried disabling anti-alias or anisotropic options, with no luck.

Has every anyone seen this kind of problem ?

Did you get the driver from Microsoft using the auto update or check for update on the Microsoft web page

or

did you get the driver from nVidia 's web page

because MicroSoft's driver SUCKES!!!-----DONT USE IT

Hello John,

As I said, I'm not using the driving from Microsoft, nor from Nvidia. I got the drivers from MSI, my card constructor.

I would like to know how can you get the pulsar textures working.I tried,but still didn?t work.For example,PSR 1257

Nobody has ever had this kind of problem ?

Daniel, be sure to modify the file psr1257.stc, adding "PSR1257" after "300002". It'll define the name of the Star.

6 months later, no one has ever had this problem ? Because I'm still having this bug

Psykotik,

I think maybe once in a while I sometimes see something like what you describe: objects look like "Emissive true" is enabled, even though it isn't.

I do not see it consistantly, and it goes away if I set "Ambient light" to off.

Hi Selden,

I don't know anything about "emissive true", but I can assure you I constantly have the textures displayed as shown. Moreover, ambiant light is always switched to off...

I was hoping that new nvidia drivers will resolve the problem, but that's 6 months of drivers I've installed

If I remember right, Jeam and other forum's user are having exactly the same trouble.

Can you provide a "good" picture that can be compared with your "bad" picture?

Unfortunately, since you only provided the "bad" picture, I don't know what that particular object is supposed to look like.

You might try turning Ambient Light on (low or medium) and then off again. Does that make a difference?

I think he is talking about the bands appearing within the emitted light
rather then the light shading out smoothly.

One of the causes of bands of equal shades of color is configuring the Display Properties "Settings" to "medium (16bit)" colors or fewer. You must set your display to full color (24 or 32 bit) to prevent them.

If your system is set for 32bit color and you're still seeing banding, then something else is going on -- maybe another program is interfering?

Darkmiss has clarified my query.

Here is a good picture, taken from the Jeam's site (before he had the same problem).

Selden,

That's what I've always thought : a color problem.

I've checked the Display Properties : set to 32 bits, and I've checked again with another program (Sandra 2003) to be totally sure.

There is no interfering program, since I've tried closing all tasks before launching Celestia.

I'm really thinking about a bug between Celestia and my video card (not so new, nowadays...). Today, I use nvidia driver 52.14.

Anyway, thanks for your time Selden.

Edit : if Chris read by chance this topic

I'm pretty sure that's a color problem : switching from 32-bits to 16-bits in Celestia will render EXACTLY the same image. No change; I'm stuck with 16-bits

I've searched around the web, but nothing found... Chris, do you have any idea ?

I don't know if it does really matters, since only Selden was interested in, but I've found the source of the problem : Celestia it-self.

Going back to 1.2.5pre6 worked like a charm; the colors were correctly displayed. Every version since 1.3 doesn't work. It seems like something is broken.

Hopefully Chris will have some idea as to why you have problems with your graphics card and other folks don't. And then be able to make a modification of some kind also.

I don't observe any problems with the blue planet, but I do see the banding in the pulsar beam on my system. However, I don't see how you could not get banding with this model. The beam is composed of segments which decrease in opacity the further they are from the star. The important thing to observe is that the opacity is constant over each segment--it's not interpolated, and beam isn't subdivided finely enough for the transitions between segments to be undetectable.

--Chris

Hi Chris,

If you look carefully at the two pictures on february 19th, you'll see Celestia render differently the pulsar (BTW, Mira too, but not so evident).

And I can affirm older celestia versions didn't manage these textures in this way... it was smoother !

I can provide a bigger picture of what these pictures should look, if needed.

Thanks for your time.

I recently noticed that i was suffering from this problem(probably for quite a while). I think there may be alot of other people suffering from it too but they just dont know. How can you tell?

Well,
In the standard distribution go to earth with its default texture and look at south america. If it looks like this...



...then you've got a problem. It should look like this...



Notice that there is no banding. The cause of the problem seems to be the nvidia drivers. Defining the colour depth as equal to the desktop colour depth appears to just render everything as 16-bit even though your desktop might be 32-bit. Furthermore the nvidia drivers dont give much control over many opengl features in their drivers so you'll have to download geforce tweak from guru3d...

http://www.guru3d.com/geforcetweakutility/

Download, install and run.
Go to the opengl tab,
navigate to the bottom,
uncheck the box marked def. opengl render quality,
and finally quit.
Dont mess with anything else unless you know what your doing.



This should fix it.

If you find you are suffering from this problem could you post a reply. If alot of people respond then it might be worth making it a sticky.

DBrady,

Well, I hate to say this, but it seems that I'm not very observant. I don't see any obvious differences between the two pictures, even though my desktop is set to 32bits.

What should I be looking for?

Added slightly later:

After staring for a while, I see that the northern parts of South America in the upper picture tend to have more light green than in the lower picture. Also, the regions of different colors of green tend to be more distinct in the upper picture than in the lower one.

I don't see those symptoms on my home system: it looks like the lower picture.

System specs:
256MB 500MHz P3, WinXP Pro SP1
128MB GF4 Ti4200, drivers v61.76

Under Performance and Quality settings:
Image settings: Quality
Antialiasing, Anisotropic and Vertical sync are all "application controlled"
Color correction: "standard mode" with all sliders centered, except that Vibrance is off.

Celestia v1.3.1-1 final
Celestia v1.3.2pre10
Celestia v1.3.2pre (cvs)