Celestia Forums

Hi friends!

I wanted to add my small contribution to the greatest program (Celestia of course ) and to the greatest add-on (Kokaubeam, I mean ).

Seriously speaking, I discovered a problem when I was showing Kokaubeam to my wanderful girlfriend ...

In detail, I discovered that "Shinehah" (with it's astonishing system of three co-rotating rings ) is incorrectly displayed in versions 1.3.2pre9, 1.3.2pre10 and 1.3.2pre11, while in releases 1.3.2pre7 and 1.3.2pre8 there are no problems at all!!!

BTW my system is a 2.7GHz Athlon, with 1Gb RAM, and my graphic card is a ATI 9600, with full (I hope!) handling of OpenGL. (now I'm at office, with a completely different hardware, and I'll give more details if needed)

Celestians! Do you have the same problem?
Chris, can you investigate in order to find the culprit?

Celestia community would be very happy! And my girlfriend too...

Ciao
Pierluigi

Pierluigi,

It would be nice if you could write exactly what is wrong and provide some screenshots to compare what is wrong with what is right. You can put them on a Web page. They don't have to be included here.

Many people do not have that Addon and would like to see what's failing.

OOPS!
Sorry, but I completely forgot to (first) make a picture showing the problem and (second) to publish it!
When I'm back home I'll do a couple of photographs...
Bye
Pierluigi

Back again...
Hi!
I have done some screenshots of the problem related to the incorrect rendering of the "shinehah nebula", belonging to Rassilon's "Kokaubeam" add-on.

With the releases 1.3.2pre7 and 1.3.2pre8 of Celestia what I see is




while in version from 9 to the latest (1.3.2.pre11) we have the problem





where the zone between the first and the second rotating ring is wrongly rendered.

In order to test what's happening I have created a reduced version of the add-on (only 2Mb zip) that contains all the necessary files!
I'm quite sure that Rassilon will agree with me!

The zip file can be downloaded here

http://piellepi.web-gratis.net/files/shinehah/shinehah.zip

Good bye
Pierluigi

I also experienced a problem which resembles your screenshot - in your case does the weird black stuff keep flickering?

I tried updating the graphics card driver which solved a superficially similar problem with eclipse shadows a while back, however it didn't help with the Shinehah rings.

Celestia 1.3.2pre11, cannot check on previous versions because improved model efficiency in pre11 is the only thing that lets me get close enough to Kokaubeam without crashing.

Hi!

Chaos , I confirm that the "weird black stuff" flickers expecially if you speed up the time (pressing the key "L" many times): doing so with the "good" Celestia versions, you can witness a magnificent whirlpool that could eve hypnotize you !
With the recent versions of Celestia, the image is quite corrupted and loses its beauty...

I don't think it's a matter of graphic card drivers, just because older versions of Celestia work well!

Bye
Pierluigi

I too can confirm a problem with not only this add-on, but several others designed by Rassilon. The Shinehah nebula has the weird rotating inner nebula lines, but in addition, has a central star whose bottom half is warped/missing when viewed from above. Here is a screenshot.



Another problem occurs with Kokaubeam. When viewed from space, I sometimes get the surrounding nebula and sometimes not. For example, the first screenshot is of the Kokaubeam Nebula surrounded by the bigger nebula. The second screenshot is from the same spot moved outward ever so slightly. The other nebula is gone.






A third rendering bug occurs with Rassilon's rotating protostar add-on. It too has the same weird spinning central black lines spinning around at high speed, and a central star (and jet) that is now being blocked by something, so the bottom half is no longer visible from above. Here is a screenshot.



Lastly, I am having trouble visualizing another add-on that Jack Higgins did for me, that might be related to the problem seen here. It is the mirror and reflected beam that I use in my Terraforming of Mars Activity. When viewed from a certain angle, the beam, which used to be transparent from all angles, now conveys its transparency to the mirror itself, so I can see through both the beam and mirror, when viewed from key angles at all distances out. Here is a screenshot. Notice the mirror portion covered by the beam has gone transparent. This did not occur in 1.3.1.





I am using a GeForce4 TI 4200 card with 128 MB video RAM on a P4 machine. I just downloaded the latest driver last night but it has not fixed the problem.


According to Rassilon, this is a continuing problem with the depth sorting of model meshes in 1.3.2. I don't know how tough it is to fix, but I love these add-ons and I hope the problem can be resolved.

Regards,

Frank