Celestia Forums

Saturn is not casting a shadow onto its rings does anybody know why.
I should have the latest OpenGL support and drivers

Thanks for replying David

Did you see the shadows before you upgraded to 10.3.6?

Rage cards are a very old design and cannot draw all of the eye-candy that Celestia provides. You should seriously consider upgrading your graphics card to an Nvidia 5200 or better. The MacOS drivers for Radeon cards don't seem to be as stable as its drivers for Nvidia cards.

Selden

selden wrote:Did you see the shadows before you upgraded to 10.3.6?

No I didn't see ring shadows before I upgraded to 3.6 or on Celestia 1.3.1 or 1.3.2-1.
I would probably update my graphics card but my computer is a fixed unit (i cannot be opened or updated. I would have to buy a new computer.

thanks

David

I've got a 2002 G4 Mac with an old Radeon 7500; in recent Celestia versions I can see the shadow of the rings on Saturn, but not the shadow of Saturn on the rings (though, oddly, once or twice I've seen a crude, blocky version of about half of the shadow-- it's a non-reproducible event).

I think it's just the old card and/or driver. The next thing I do to this computer will probably be to get a better video card... it's almost three years old now, stock except for a new hard drive after the old one self-destructed, and holding up remarkably well otherwise; still doesn't feel slow.