Celestia Forums

First off, I apologize if this is not the place for this, but it's not covered in the FAQ and I'm flabbergasted as to why I'm having this problem with Celestia.

I've been using the program on another PC [in Canada] for about a year without issues, but I'm only now installing it on this PC [in Europe] and there's a serious problem; no stars.

I can see the Sun, and it's image/haze/etc is normal, but there's no field of distant fuzzy dots that we're all used to seeing, only black and a few sparse white blips reminiscent of 1950's scifi films. Cranking up the Magnitude Limit doesn't change this, my filter distance is at max and yes, the "Show: Stars" box is checked. I've used Cel 1.3.2 a lot so I know my way around it, my only guess is that it's some buggery graphics card problem? I can't find the exact specs for the GFX card but it's able to run Sims2 so it's a decent low-end bit of hardware.

Any solutions would be appreciated, thanks!

The specs for the card and its graphics drivers are in Celestia's help menu, OpenGL Info.

I've never seen this particular problem but, as usual, I suspect ancient, buggy graphics drivers.

This is what the OpenGL info says:

Vendor: SiS
Renderer: 650/M650 VGA / MMX/SSE2 /AGP
Version: 1.2.1
Max simultaneous textures: 2
Max texture size: 2048

Went to the SiS website, downloaded a driver for my card [651] and got that sorted, so now I can see the field of stars, but now planetary graphics are messed up; Earth is purple w/ white oceans, Saturn and Jupiter have holes in them and Titan is dark blue, etc.

This is less of an issue because I use Celestia primarily for stellar cartography, thanks for the help.

So now you've got *new* buggy drivers

If you disable hardware acceleration entirely, you'll be using Microsoft's software OpenGL. They aren't quite as buggy as you describe, so things should look a little better, but Celestia won't run as fast.