Night Side Lights Not Displaying

[APeX3181]

Hi everyone,

I downloaded Celestia for the first time tonight and it's such an awesome program!! I've been messing around with it for the last few hours and have figured out a lot of things that you could do, but for some reason I can't get my night side lights to display.

Now, I have an "earthnight.jpg" file in the lores and medres directories and it still isn't displaying. I have an NVIDIA 8800GTS graphics card running on Windows Vista Home Premium. I've switched through all the resolution settings and toggled the lights on/off (CTRL+L) several times still with no luck.

Can someone help me out with this? I've searched around the forums and couldn't find anything helpful yet.

[Derek]

Hi, APeX3181

Look at your render path, Crtl-v anything but the "basic path" should put the lights on.

[selden]

APeX,

You should consider upgrading your graphics drivers to the most recent version provided by the vendor of your graphics hardware.

Also, make sure that graphics hardware acceleration is enabled.

As Derek pointed out, to view NightLights your graphics hardware needs to support Celestia's Multitexture Render path. That is the next step up from Basic. It also is equivalent to requiring your graphics drivers to support OpenGL v1.2. Assuming you're running a version of Windows, the OpenGL drivers provided by Microsoft which are used when hardware acceleration is disabled are only OpenGL v1.1.

You can find out what version of OpenGL is being used by opening Celestia's Help menu and selecting the OpenGL Info item.

[APeX3181]

Well, I've tried everything mentioned and the night side lights still don't display. I guess it must be some issue with the 8800GTS. I checked my OpenGL version: 2.1.2.

I also noticed that when I try to toggle through the render paths (CTRL-V), nothing seems to happen. It should say "Basic", "Multitexture", etc. but doesn't say anything.

I installed Celestia on my laptop (same version of Vista) which uses a different NVidia card, and everything works like its supposed to.

[DonAVP]

Well then it is your video card, the drivers or maybe a hardware problem. Oh, it could be a bug called MicroSoft and Vista. Sorry, I couldn't help it. I would not touch Vista with you computer LOL.

Seriously, if the computer is fairly new I would have someone look at it were you bought it. If you are doing any gaming on the computer that should show the same problems.

Don

[APeX3181]

I don't think Vista is any better or any worse than XP...it just looks nicer. There are a few annoyances here and there, but I run all of my other programs without a problem, Flight Simulator, Gears of War, Crysis, etc. All look great on Vista with the card I have. And those are fairly demanding games when it comes to system capability.

OK, well I'm not sure what I did, but the lights are working now.

[selden]

Not seeing any render path name means that Celestia's running only in Basic mode. I suspect that something went wrong with the graphics driver installation. Redoing that might explain why it works now.

[John Van Vliet]

hi i would add that the driver is most likely your problem ,use selden's advice about the nvidia driver . If there is one from nvidia for your NVIDIA 8800GTS
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
use it . And do not use the one from from Microsoft

[buggs_moran]

I seem to have the same issues around a night texture applied to moons. The planetary night textures work fine. I cannot see my Io night textures.

[Derek]

Buggs,

A rather stupid question but have tried changing the viewing position?

[buggs_moran]

Yes, tried changing position, ambiance, renderer, menu items, etc...

[chris]

Yes, tried changing position, ambiance, renderer, menu items, etc...

Could you post the ssc definition you're using for Io? I just tried adding a night texture to the default Io from solarsys.ssc and it worked fine.

--Chris

[John Van Vliet]

if it is my IoNight it is /exteas/IoNight.ssc

Code: Select all

Modify "Io" "Sol/Jupiter"
{
   NightTexture "IoNight.png" 
         
}

bob reported a problem with this on his vista box and needed to edit the io.ssc to fix this
----
also buggs_moran give editing the /data/solarsys.ssc
by adding the line

Code: Select all

NightTexture "IoNight.png" 

in the section for io

[buggs_moran]

also buggs_moran give editing the /data/solarsys.ssc
by adding the line

Code: Select all

NightTexture "IoNight.png"

in the section for io

That's it exactly, thanks John.

[chris]

OK. I tested John's IoNight.png and it works fine on my system with a GeForce 8. Later, I'll try it on my old Powerbook, which has an ATI 9600 in it.

--Chris

[John Van Vliet]

buggs_moran glad to here it worked

[buggs_moran]

buggs_moran glad to here it worked

Sorry John, I meant that your ssc was what I had for my ssc...

I tried reinstalling Celestia, tried using John's setup, tried setting a night side on Europa, all to no avail... I can see the night side of Jupiter when installed, but not on moons.

[John Van Vliet]

lets check some basics
1) earthnight ( default / and or addon's ) -- works --
the map is /celestia/textures/medres/earthnight.jpg
the solarsys.ssc for earth

Code: Select all

"Earth" "Sol"
{
   Texture "earth.*"
   NightTexture "earthnight.*"


2) IoNight -- dose not --
the map is /celestia/textures/medres/IoNight.png
the IoNight.ssc is in /celestia/extras
/celestia/extras/IoNight.ssc

Code: Select all

Modify "Io" "Sol/Jupiter"
{
   NightTexture "IoNight.png" 
         
}


dose editing /celestia/data/solarsys.ssc work

"Io" "Sol/Jupiter"
{
Texture "io.*"
NightTexture "IoNight.png"
Radius 1821.6

CustomOrbit "io"
....

also have you checked the ati forums .Ati is well known for not supporting
OpenGL very well .I do know there is a hacked ati driver for fedora linux that uses opengl but i do not know if there is one for windows.

if adding the map to the solarsys.ssc dose not work then i would have to say that the problem is the ati driver, but this is a deductive guess.[/quote]

[BobHegwood]

Just for information here...

John's night textures all work fine on my system, and I believe that
any problems must be related to graphics hardware and updates.

I had to play a bit with combining SSC modifications into a single
file, but this had nothing to do with John's night textures. Again, all
of John's night texture add-ons work as they are supposed to on
my machine. Jupiter, Io and Earth are all fine, so the problem simply
has to be on your machine. Again, just FYI.

[buggs_moran]

Strange that it is just the moons though....

It must be my machine, what a strange glitch. I will attempt it at work today if I get the chance. What a bummer. I updated the ATI drivers to see if that was it with no luck. I will have to lobby for a Nvidia. Perhaps I can earmark a bill.