Celestia Forums

this latest version of celestia 1.3 must have some memory holes in it because the ringed planets do not look right and slow down my rendering big time. I've got a W2k/1.7 athalon/ati 9000 128meg/384 RAM. the other versions work fine, but not this latest version. any clues on a work-around?

Usually ring problems are due to ATI cards... Hopefully someone else can expand...?!

I am told that ringed planets are drawn fine on Radeon 9500 or higher.

Apparently there have been bugs for a long time in ATI's OpenGL drivers for Radeon cards with model numbers less than 9500, and they don't seem to be interested in fixing them

One of the symptoms is that the surfaces of ringed planets have black blotches on them when ring shadows are enabled.

One workaround is just to turn off ring shadows in Celestia's "Render" "View Options..." menu.

Another work-around is to tell Celestia not to try to use the OpenGL vertex routines when you want to look at ringed planets. Type a Control-V until you see "Render Path: Basic" or "Render Path: Multitexture".

Could it be that his rings textures are simply at a resolution which is to LARGE for the OpenGL driver? Mr. Higgins and Mr. Ball managed to help me get through THIS problem at last...

Seems that Celestia 1.3.0 WILL allow the used of oversized grahics textures, no matter what your OpenGL says.

Celestia 1.3.1 will NOT. I fixed these problems on my machine by simply resizing the large Jupiter and Saturn rings textures using a program called Pixia. See the Topic "At Selden's Request" in this Forum for the complete details.

Thanks, Bob