Celestia Forums

i love celestia, dont get me wrong, i also love star strider(except its not free, doh). My questiion is, how come celestia cant multipass texutring, ring shawows and such on my computer but starstrider can handle it with ease. Im using a 2ghz, 256 ram, 128 ultra rage graphics card? Thanks

Chrisr,

Is it simply your graphics card, or does it have to do with OpenGL?

I have NO special graphics card, and I get multitexturing and ring shadows
with no problem. Maybe your Ultra Rage graphics manufacturer has some
updated OpenGL drivers available? Just a thought, because I had to update my poor
simple Intel 82815 graphics drivers when I first started using Celestia.

Just trying to help.

Take care, Bob

Guys the main reason is Star Stider is Direct X based versus OpenGL. That is the same diference that we have with Orbiter. At this point those writting programs in Direct X have a little easier time plugging in the neat ooh-ahh fetures than Chris does using OpenGL in an a totaly opensourse program.
I am sure if Chris wanted to close Celestia to a Windows only Direct X program he to add all these neat features right off the bat. It is a small price to pay to keep the program the universal OpenGL cross platform program that it is.

Don. Edwards

That's what I was trying to tell Chrisr, Don...

All he needs is updated OpenGL drivers for rings shadows and multitextures though isn't it?

That's all I had to do...

Thanks, Bob

No Bob,
The main reason he is not seeing these features is he is useing an ATI video card. Well thats why in a nutsell. ATI has always prefered Microsofts Direct X over OpenGL. To this day there OpenGL drivers are no were near as good as NVidia's. ATI uses very squirly code in there OpenGL drivers. That is why Celestia didn't really support any ATI cards until just the last 9 months.

chrisr,
This is just going to be something you are going to have to live with until such a time that ATI gets there act together and makes decent OpenGL drivers that are totaly complient with the standard. Chris is doing everything he can to make Celestia compatible but the fact has been from the begining and still is to this day. If you want to see Celestia at its best it has to be on an NVidia GeForce video card. If you do any checking in the forum over the past 2 years that is the same song we have sung all along. All of Celestia's developer use NVidia. I don''t think a one of then has an ATI card. And unless someone wants to buy Chris a free ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card to use as a test-bed this is not going to change.
I would expect the same problems to crop up when the XGI Volarae cards hit the market in the next few months. Sorry but as far as Celestia is conserned NVidia still rules as king and it doesn't look like this is one place that ATI can claim any wins at all.

Don. Edwards

Okay, I see what you're saying now Don.

Sorry, I did NOT understand that the ATI cards didn't support OpenGL.

Thanks for the information. You can BET that I'll be getting an NVidia GeForce card when I get ready to add graphics and memory.

Why is it that my poor XP with NO graphics card can render these beautiful displays? Simply because Intel at least supports OpenGL to *some* degree? I say *some* because I can only use 1k textures and my OpenGL drivers support only the Basic and Multitexture functions.

That's alright though... I *love* the stuff that I CAN see.

Thanks, Bob

Hi Bob,
I am not saying that ATI doesn't support OpenGL just that they support it in a general way. As does your built-in Intel Graphics. There was a time when ATI had very good OpenGL support. It lasted all but a couple of years. Than as the game engines took a divided stand between Direct X and OpenGL you ended up with two very diverging standards. Most of the new games are written in Direct X. The others are built on top of the venerable Quake engine that has been tweaked and twisted over the years to do things they never thought possible. I think if it were not for Id and the Quake engine games Microsoft would have pulled off putting the final nail in the OpenGL's gaming coffin long ago. The fact that OpenGL is totally cross platform has helped it to survive and has made it possible for all those Quake engine based games to be ported to so many other operating systems. You just do not see that happening as often with a Direct X title. Another thing is that ATI is notorious for postponing driver releases or just releasing bad drivers that break allot of games and other software. There Catalyst drivers were supposed to bring this problem to an end but the truth is NVidia puts out twice the updated drivers that ATI does. ATI’s newer cards do support allot of the newer OpenGL features but they have to written in a way that ATI’s drivers can work with. As I said Chris has done a great job without the use of an ATI Radeon based card to bring some of the NVidia GeForce only features to ATI users. But there is still a long way to go. All I can say is take all your priorities into account when purchasing a new card. You can either buy the fastest video card for games but loose features with Celestia or go for a slightly slower card that has proven OpenGL compatibility with both games and Celestia.

Chrisr probably bought his card for the gaming side of things. I am not 100% sure what chipset his card has. Allot of the ATI OEM partners are naming there cards all sorts of things so I can’t be sure if his card is a Radeon class card or just a Rage class card. If his card is a Rage class card that is were his problem lies. It has no pixel or vertex shadders at all so he will never see any of these effects under Celestia. So if it is a Rage based card it is based on 3D technology that is older than the first GeForce cards ever made. And if it is based on a Radeon chipset that still doesn’t mean it will work. ATI just like Nvidia has neutered video chipsets and they do not like airing the facts that these cards can’t do certain things just to get sales. Just like all the hot air that went around about the GeForce MX cards. They called them GeForce4 MX so allot of people thought they were true GeForce4’s. They weren’t. They were GeForce2 MX 400 cards with the GeForce3’s Anti-Aliasing engine built in and a newer memory subsystem. That was it. Now these cards do work under Celestia and quite well but allot slower than a true GeForce4 does. I won’t go into anymore comparing of features. But needless to say I still think Celestia read me files needs to explain a little better about what features are going to and not going to work and what video cards to expect problems with. Well I think that cover enough on this subject. I can not help chrisr any further without knowing exactly what he has for a video card.

Don. Edwards

Don, you are not entirely correct on two items.

1)
I consider myself a Celestia Developer. I use an ATI Radeon 9000 M.

2)
On my Radeon 9000 M, the Linux drivers from ATI do eclipse shadows just fine. Also night lights and multitexture. Vertex shading also works.

Though I would agree that my nVidia GeForce 460 does a superior job on my old Windows box, the ATI performs adequately, and is able to use all features in Celestia.

Then again, the Rage class is much older. I got my first Rage in 1996, though they were in production until 2001.

suwalski,
I was speaking of Windoze drivers for the ATI cards. Linux is a whole seperate kettle of fish. I am happy to here that you have those features working in Celestia on your ATI card under Linux. But the simple truth is take that card and load it up in a Windows environment and see if you get the same results. I doubt you will get 100% of the features that are supposed to be working.

One other thing I noticed about Star-Strider. I hate trying to navigate around planets. It sucks. I love the fact that in Celestia I can grab a planet and manipulate it to whatever position you want. Try that in Star-Strider. Not going to happen. I ported several of my textures over to .JPG just so I could see what they would like. I was blown away by the how my 8k clouds look with real dropshadows and bumpmaping. But Star-Strider’s atmospheric settings need work as they are to white. All in all my Earth texture is of course much better than what comes with the program but it does look a bit dark. Here is an example.




Looks nice but I am sticking with Celestia. As far as I am concerned Star-Strider is a good general astronomy tool but it need more spit and polish and it certainly could use some of the things we take for granted in Celestia. At this point in its development I wouldn’t spend a dime on it. I wish its creator all the luck in the world.
Don. Edwards

Howdy All,

I am using an ATI graphics card with Celestia in Windows XP Pro and have no problems at all, even with the 32K VTs. I have rings, planet and ring shadows, night-side lights, and everything else -- with 3 modes available (Basic, Multitexture and vertex program). A couple of months ago, Chris posted a picture of one of the probes we sent out, taken with his new nVidia, and I hate to say it, but my ATI display looked better than his hi-res image.

My card is a one year old ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with 128 MB of memory. The Windows Catalyst drivers are version 3.6.

A happy ATI user <smile>.

-Don G.

Don,
How is bump/normal mapping working on your ATI 9700Pro. From what I understood that was one area that still was a bit buggy.

Don. Edwards

Howdy Don,

If you can tell me what files to use (and where to place them in Celestia) and if any .ssc file mods are necessary, I will be happy to test them and print screen shots for comparison.

I will install the files on a clean-install of 1.3.1 final and go from there.

Thank you Don,

-Don G.

Don,
You are opening yourself up to video card kill. I love it. Not many people are willing to overload there video card.
So of course let me think for a while and put together a list of files that you can download of and I will implement then into a working solarsys.ssc that you can download it and then load into your new install. I will base the textures on mostly my stuff, like the 16k Earth and so on as to keep away from the virtual textures. I would like to cram as much as possible into the cards memory and see what it can and can not do. Everything I put together will function on my system with my GeForce4 TI 4600 128MB card and at a workable frame rate. Or what I find a workable frame rate.
So I will get back to you probably by a personal message.


Don. Edwards

Howdy Don,

I'm always happy to test stuff. I don't really know what my video card will do with Celestia as I've not learned enough to overload it with anything other than VTs.

Currently, I have the following files of yours, if any of them are useful. Otherwise, I'll download whatever you think would be a good trial ...

* Realistic-Earth16kdds.zip (7/31/2003)
* EarthSpecMap8k.zip (7/24/2003)
* Earth-8K-normap-12x.zip (7/24/2003)
* clouds001[1].jpg (7/27/2003)
* lights001[1].jpg (7/27/2003)
* Earth.exe (7/24/2003)

Below, is a segment of Earth/Sol in solarsys.ssc that I use with 1.3.1 pre 11 ...


Cheers,

-Don G.

Windows users can download this free app to show how well their video cards support the various OpenGL standards and extensions. Not sure which ones Celestia uses, but this at least will give you a good idea of how capable your card and video drivers are for OpenGL

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail.ph ... 1060137702

http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/

Thank you for the links Ross. My card is 100% OpenGL 1.4 compliant, which is what Celestia uses.