Celestia Forums

I had to reinstall my OS this week. All software, hardware and drivers are the same. My system:

Windows 2000, SP4, DirectX9b

ATI Radeon 9200se, 128 MB, 4x

1024x768 32 bit display

Duron 1.1 Ghz

768 MB RAM + 1.5 - 2 GB pagefile.

I previously had Celestia 1.3.1 running quite fine. I had added several add-ons running with no problems.

After reinstalling Saturn, Uranus and Neptune will not render correctly and when they are the selected planet, Celestia runs very slow and choppy. All other planets, and all satellites, render properly; only the three above are a problem. Below are links to screenshots I made of Saturn and Uranus:

http://members.shaw.ca/pyritechips/distorted2.jpg

http://members.shaw.ca/pyritechips/distorted.jpg

I have rechecked my system settings and clean installed a new download of Celestia but this anomaly persists.

Any soultions?

I have continued to think about this anomaly and something occured to me:

All of the affected planets are gas giants but Jupiter was not included with them. I then asked myself what those three had in common and the answer is:

Ring systems! I experimented by turning off ring shadows and the planets now render correctly.

Ring shadows are not a critical element as far as I am concerned so if there is not a workaround for this problem then I won't be upset. I am just puzzled as to why they worked before but don't now.

Update:

I have cycled the 3 different render paths with CTRL+V. Multitexture and Basic both work fine. OpenGL does not.

Have a look at this thread. A new graphics card driver should help (according to selden).

Harald

Harald:

Thank you kindly for the link. I am sorry I didn't find it myself when I did a search.

I quote:

b) Any graphics card with drivers that support OpenGL v1.4 (e.g. ATI Radeon 9500 or better; Nvidia GF4 Ti 4xxx series cards)

(Note: As of March,'04, ATI has fixed many of the bugs in the drivers for their lower performance cards with model numbers less than 9500, but some features are still missing.)

I had to try several driver downloads before I found the correct one (as Selden says, one as of March 2004). I now have a driver dated 4/21/2004. It doesn't have Open GL 1.4; it has the same old Version: 1.3.4332 Win2000 but I can now render ring shadows and in proper Open GL rendering.

Thank you kindly; my problem seems to be solved.