Celestia Forums

Oh I hope this gets included into Celestia as standard
along with the space craft orbits crash fix for 132p2


Great work Kendrix

Kendrix wrote:Ok here is the new .exe :
KCelestia.zip
Now the number of samples for planet orbits is 200. It's nearly equal to 1000 visually !

Hello Kendrix, one information please: your Kcelestia.exe file works with the last Celestia pre3 and pre4 releases too?
Thank you very much.

Andrea

ANDREA wrote:Hello Kendrix, one information please: your Kcelestia.exe file works with the last Celestia pre3 and pre4 releases too? :oops:

Kendrix's patch has been included in the main codebase, so there is no need to use his .exe with the latest pre releases.

Christophe wrote:

ANDREA wrote:Hello Kendrix, one information please: your Kcelestia.exe file works with the last Celestia pre3 and pre4 releases too?

Kendrix's patch has been included in the main codebase, so there is no need to use his .exe with the latest pre releases.

I'm not sure which off Kentrix's code has included in Celestia pre3 and pre4 (Windows) but I know there is a big difference to KCelestia.

- absolute ugly orbits, (a lot off egdes are visible)
- ugly Saturn rings (not the texture),
- lowres shadow texture (it should be no problem to make this depend on Hardware but at most 2k.)

Maybe Chris has foregotten to include this code?

Bye Jens

jim wrote:I'm not sure which off Kentrix's code has included in Celestia pre3 and pre4 (Windows) but I know there is a big difference to KCelestia.

- absolute ugly orbits, (a lot off egdes are visible)
- ugly Saturn rings (not the texture),
- lowres shadow texture (it should be no problem to make this depend on Hardware but at most 2k.)

Maybe Chris has foregotten to include this code?

I was the one who did the commit. If Kendrix did any other modification to his version beside the orbit patch I'm not aware of it. The only code he submited regarded orbit rendering, and that is that code that is now in CVS.

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/celestia/celestia/src/celengine/samporbit.cpp

I did adjust the maximum curvature for orbit paths upward slightly in order to bring the number of points down slightly. But, the effect was subtle and should not have resulted in ugly orbits. Could you provide a screen shot Jens?

--Chris

Hi Chris and Christophe,

Ok, now I at home.

Chris wrote:I did adjust the maximum curvature for orbit paths upward slightly in order to bring the number of points down slightly. But, the effect was subtle and should not have resulted in ugly orbits. Could you provide a screen shot Jens?

Here are the shots. I think you can see that there are some big differences between KCelestia (latest one from 5. Jan ) and Celestia 1.3.2pre4.



Except the different ring texture and colore there are three things to see in Pre4:
1. edges at the orbits,
2. edges at the ring modell,
3. lowres shadow texture.

To the third, point I know that not every graphic card can handle a 2k shadow texture but it should be no problem to adapt the size automatically.

I hope you can unterstand why I want all this beautiful features in base Celestia.

Christophe wrote:I was the one who did the commit.

I know I was the one that told Kendrix about you.

Christophe wrote:If Kendrix did any other modification to his version beside the orbit patch I'm not aware of it. The only code he submited regarded orbit rendering, and that is that code that is now in CVS.

I'm sure there are more new code. But as far as I know you asked Kendrix only for the orbit code.
I got his email adress and can send this to you or Chris if you want?

Bye Jens

Here are my 2 cents (from very latest CVS):

the red "orbit" is really kinky rather than "super-smooth". So something quite dramatic changed relative to Kendrix' code...(of course I had a look in the CVS;-))

Bye Fridger

There were two parts to Kendrix's orbit patch: adaptively sampled spacecraft orbits, and an increased number of samples for other orbits. I incorporated the first change, but not the second. I also elected not to include the higher resolution shadow texture and the higher detail rings. In all of these cases, I chose to trade visual quality for speed, because I'm very concerned about how Celestia will perform on lower end machines. The size of the ring shadow texture is especially concerning--a 2048x2048 texture is 4MB of video memory! Perhaps it would be best to allow these to be controlled with settings in celestia.cfg . . .

Fridger: is that red line the orbit of a spacecraft or a moon?

--Chris

Perhaps it would be best to allow these to be controlled with settings in celestia.cfg . . .

Yes please, if it is possible to do so. I rely on superprecise orbits, speed is far less of an issue.

chris wrote:There were two parts to Kendrix's orbit patch: adaptively sampled spacecraft orbits, and an increased number of samples for other orbits. I incorporated the first change, but not the second. I also elected not to include the higher resolution shadow texture and the higher detail rings. In all of these cases, I chose to trade visual quality for speed, because I'm very concerned about how Celestia will perform on lower end machines. The size of the ring shadow texture is especially concerning--a 2048x2048 texture is 4MB of video memory! Perhaps it would be best to allow these to be controlled with settings in celestia.cfg . . .

Fridger: is that red line the orbit of a spacecraft or a moon?

--Chris

Chris,

since it is red, it is the orbit of the selection which is Saturn as you can tell from the red selection "diamond" in its center...I found quite a number of further bad orbit kinks, in fact.

Bye Fridger

Chris wrote:Perhaps it would be best to allow these to be controlled with settings in celestia.cfg . . .

Falck wrote:Yes please, if it is possible to do so. I rely on superprecise orbits, speed is far less of an issue.

Yes, please!! At least give us the option of improving these settings, if our systems can handle it. It's a bit unfair on those of us who can display these things, to have them left out, even as an option, for the sake of lower level systems.

(Apologies to anyone who has a system that can't handle the other items from Kendrix's mod, but you know, we all like silky smooth curves... )