BUGS: stuck in space, Earth orientation, speed vs. time

[Mladen]

I'm running Win2k SP3 with Celestia 1.3.1

I often use the Sun as an orientation point when tracking spacecraft trajectories. I center on it, diplay orbits and elevate myself above the Solar System. I do this repeatedly for different stages I am observing. When I press H and G sequentially fast, the screen starts to "bend", like a rubber sheet being stretched at the edges, and I end up with a blank screen saying I'm at a zero distance from the Sun. From that point on, all navigation is dead until I restart Celestia.

Another thing. When I watch the Earth in present, I would expect to see the cities expiriencing night at the moment to be on the dark side. This is not always the case. Sometimes I fire up Celestia, set current time and this is wrong. For example, it's 16:00 UTC now and Celestia displays half of Europe in dark.

Lastly, when using acceleration and deceleration controls to "fly my spaceship", speed has nothing to do with the flow of time. If I pause time, I'm still moving. If I accelerate time, everything in the Universe moves faster, but I still move at the same speed. This makes it impossible to simulate real travel: I'd like to travel from Earth to Mars at a realistic speed and accelerate time to see how it takes me months to get there.

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Mladen

[don]

Hello Mladen,

Can you provide more details as to how someone else could reproduce these problems? Step-by-step maybe? I am not able to do so on WinXP Pro SP1.

What graphics card does your system have?

Regarding your third item, that would be considered a Feature Request since motion (flying) was designed to function with no respect to time.

Cheers,

-Don G.

[Guest]

My GPU is Nvidia GeForce 2 MX 32MB.

About the "stuck in space" problem, I'm afraid I can't consecutively reproduce it. Though each time I play with commands a bit longer it occurs. Here's what usually does it: chase Voyager 1 or Galileo and do a series of tracking planets as you pass by them. Run time fast before Voyager set off and then forward again. Track Jupiter, goto Voyager. Should lock up.

I don't think this has anything to do with my GPU, since everything is dead, the figures in top left corner do not show any movement when I make a command.

As far as Earth's orientation is considered, I'll experiment a bit to figure out just how much off it is (if it is off).

I'll ask about the travelling in the users forum then.

[don]

I tried your steps a couple of different times and was not able to freeze Celestia (1.3.1 final).

Has anyone else out there been able to duplicate this?

-Don G.