Celestia Forums

I can't see Saturn shadow in its rings , I have a matrox 550 GeForce! anyone can help me?

My understanding is that Matrox uses their own chipset, not Nvidia's GeForce chips. To find out the details of your graphic chipset, open Celestia's Help menu and select the "OpenGL Info" item. It'll open another window. The chipset details are in the first two lines. The OpenGL library version is in the third line.

In order to display the shadow of the planet on the rings, your card needs to support Celestia's "Multitexture" rendering path. You also have to have "Ring Shadows" selected in the "Render" "View Options" menu.

Type a Control-V several times slowly. Each time you type a Control-V, Celestia will display a "flash message" telling you which rendering path it is using for your card. If more than one is available, it'll step to the next one each time you type Control-V. At the moment, there are 5 paths possible, although not all of them are available for all cards. The paths are "Basic", "Multitexture", "NVIDIA combiners", "OpenGL vertex programs" and "OpenGL vertex programs/NVIDIA combiners".

"Multitexture" is supported by just about all of the OpenGL libraries. You should make sure that you have the most recent one installed for your chipset. It is available for free downloading from the manufacturer of your graphcs card.

First of all very thanks but I still have the problem: this is the content og "Info":

Vendor: Matrox Graphics Inc.

Renderer: Matrox G400

Version: 1.1.3 Aug 2 2001

Max simultaneous textures: 2

Max texture size: 2048



Supported Extensions:

GL_ARB_multitexture

GL_ARB_texture_env_add

GL_Autodesk_facet_normal

GL_EXT_abgr

GL_EXT_bgra

GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array

GL_EXT_packed_pixels

GL_EXT_separate_specular_color

GL_EXT_stencil_wrap

GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp

GL_EXT_texture_env_add

GL_EXT_vertex_array

GL_KTX_buffer_region

GL_SGIS_multitexture

GL_WIN_swap_hint

WGL_EXT_swap_control


and typing control-v nothing happens. It is very strange, even the dark side of earth is not visible but all the planets seems normally rendered

Your Matrox card is definetly having a problem. It is probably not compatible with all the OpenGL code as of yet. Matrox Cards have always been kinda buggy when it came to OpenGL anyway. Matrox is slow to release new OpenGL IDC drivers and when they do there always seems to be some function thats suppose to work that doesn't. Don't get me wrong they make great cards but they have always done things in a backward- sideways kind of way thats there own. Thats why they make great cards that knowone buys. You just may have to live with it until Chris has Celestia fully 100% compatible with all video cards that support OpenGL. When and if that will ever happen.
Sorry!
I have a real nice NVdia Quadro2 64mb card for sale. Basicly the same as a GeForce2 GTS or GeForce2 TI I believe.