Celestia Forums

Celestia 1.4.1 for OSX, nvidia geforce 64 mb, 1GB ram:
Two problems with VTs on very big planets:

1) If the planet has any oblateness, the virtual textures aren??t working on higher levels - level 8-10) (they flicker on and off, and more or less disappears everywhere exept right ahead of the camera). The size of the VT has nothing t do with it (it happens with both 512k and 1024k tiles).
I reported this once before, a couple of years ago, but now i have encountered it again, in 1.4.1.

2) Much stranger:
If a ring for the planet is defined in the ssc file, levels above level 7 aren??t drawn. This is regardless of tilesize, and also of the size of the ring texture: if i comment out the actual ring texture but leave the definitions of it in, the problem still persists. Even if the rings are outside camera view.

If i comment out the entire ring definition, levels 7-10 work as they should.

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:If a ring for the planet is defined in the ssc file, levels above level 7 aren??t drawn. This is regardless of tilesize, and also of the size of the ring texture: if i comment out the actual ring texture but leave the definitions of it in, the problem still persists. Even if the rings are outside camera view

Does anybody understand why this is?

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:If a ring for the planet is defined in the ssc file, levels above level 7 aren??t drawn. This is regardless of tilesize, and also of the size of the ring texture: if i comment out the actual ring texture but leave the definitions of it in, the problem still persists. Even if the rings are outside camera view

I have now ascertained that this is not a memory problem: by assigning the rings only to a separate planet with a smaller radius inside the original one. Now i can zoom to level 10 AND see the rings at the same time. Of course i won??t get ring shadows now... But unfortunately, i get an eclipse shadow from the inside planet on the outside planet texture instead... But it should be invisible...

Anyhow, this suggests to me that there is a bug in Celestia that makes it fail to load VT levels above level 7 if the planet has a ring system in the SSC file.

- rthorvald

Nobody ever acknowledged these bugs, and i really would like to know more about it since it is highly relevant to my current project. Particularily with 1.5 coming up, is there anything here that might change?

Thanks,

rthorvald

I'll take a look . . . I have some idea about what could be going on here.

--Chris

chris wrote:I'll take a look

Thank you.

- rthorvald