Please report problems with the MacOS X version here.

[HankR]

Matt,

The constellation boundaries look correct to me, at least around Polaris. They appear to me to be properly aligned with respect to both the celestial coordinate grid and the stars. I base this on a comparison with the star chart in Wil Tirion's Cambridge Star Atlas 2000. Can you be more specific about what you think is wrong? Keep in mind that the boundaries were defined in the nineteenth century and have shifted with respect to equatorial coordinates due to precession.

- Hank

[etrepum]

* The delete (backspace) key doesn't work. (Type carefully.)

* Picking is hit or miss -- mostly miss. (You'll have to type. See previous entry.)

* Favorites are flakey.

* Display of orbits is not working correctly.

Try cmd-L for "go to location", instead of typing via enter.

Now that Celestia supports URLs, I'll probably rewrite the favorites stuff anyhow... but if they're broken, it's probably because something changed since I wrote the code.. they worked fine before from what I remember.

Not sure about the other two.

[HankR]

Hi, Bob!

I've already fixed the problem with the backspace key in text entry mode, but until I get a new version out the "Go To Object" panel (cmd-L) works quite well, as you suggest (although there appears to be a problem with latitude/longitude). I've also corrected the problem with picking, which was due to inverted y-coordinates in the Cocoa view (thanks to Colin K. for providing a simple fix for that one).

Your implementation of favorites still works pretty well, actually. There are just a couple of minor problems. But you're right that it needs to be rewritten to take advantage of the new URL stuff.

I haven't dug into the problem with orbit display yet, and to be honest at this point I'm a little skeptical that it's a porting problem, although I haven't seen any complaints about it from users of other platforms. I guess we'll see.

For those who may be unaware, Bob is the developer responsible for practically all the work to date on the Mac OS X port of Celestia.

Many thanks, Bob, from all of us, for all your effort!

- Hank

[HankR]

Keep in mind that the boundaries were defined in the nineteenth century and have shifted with respect to equatorial coordinates due to precession.

Ah, of course, my mistake. I was thinking they were defined in terms of RA/declination, which of course would be epoch-dependent.

[Matt McIrvin]

Keep in mind that the boundaries were defined in the nineteenth century and have shifted with respect to equatorial coordinates due to precession.

Ah, of course, my mistake. I was thinking they were defined in terms of RA/declination, which of course would be epoch-dependent.

That was me talking, not Hank. When I quoted him without logging in, the username defaulted to "HankR"-- I wonder why?

[HankR]

Matt,

I'm glad you got me looking closely at the constellation boundaries. It appears as if one segment of each boundary is not being drawn. I believe each segment is supposed to be drawn twice, once for the constellation on each side. But some segments appear fainter than most, perhaps because they are being drawn by only one of the adjoining constellations. In at least one case the segment is missing entirely, perhaps because by chance the adjoining constellations failed to draw the same segment. I'll have to investigate to verify this but it seems reasonable to suspect.
Also, it looks like there's a spurious segment in the boundary for Octans, connecting to the south celestial pole. These kinds of little things are easily overlooked, so thanks again for making me look carefully!

- Hank

[Thorsten]

Oh yes ! I thought it was my graphic card... but finally, I'm not allone.

What are your graphic card ?

Hi Vinc26

My Graphic Card is a Gforce4 MX in a 17" iMac800

Thorsten

[chris]

Matt,

I'm glad you got me looking closely at the constellation boundaries. It appears as if one segment of each boundary is not being drawn. I believe each segment is supposed to be drawn twice, once for the constellation on each side. But some segments appear fainter than most, perhaps because they are being drawn by only one of the adjoining constellations. In at least one case the segment is missing entirely, perhaps because by chance the adjoining constellations failed to draw the same segment. I'll have to investigate to verify this but it seems reasonable to suspect.
Also, it looks like there's a spurious segment in the boundary for Octans, connecting to the south celestial pole. These kinds of little things are easily overlooked, so thanks again for making me look carefully!

- Hank

There are similar oddities on Windows and Linux. The constellation borders need some . . . 'conditioning' :> The duplicate segments should be removed; this would fix the brightness variations.

--Chris

[Matt McIrvin]

I haven't dug into the problem with orbit display yet, and to be honest at this point I'm a little skeptical that it's a porting problem, although I haven't seen any complaints about it from users of other platforms. I guess we'll see.

I don't know anything about the internals of Celestia, but just from eyeballing the problem, I'd guess that it has to do with something like positions on the rendered orbit getting scaled wrongly when they overflow some threshold. What happens is that the orbit looks OK until you get somewhat close, then parts of it start getting clipped off and reappearing in shrunken form.

[MBodkin]

Are there any known issues using an ATI Radeon 32MB card on a Graphite 450 Mhz G4? It runs fine on my office machines which all have Invidia graphics cards. At home, where I can play, I have an original Radeon... and it won't work. The app seems to run fine, but the display window is blank.

[HankR]

MBodkin,

Does the 1.2.2 version of Celestia for Mac OS X work on your system?

- Hank

[MBodkin]

Yes, in that I can use it. However, it always crashes as I approach earth and unexpectedly quits... um..unexpectedly. (Different problem, I suspect)

[TomTzart]

Is anybody has the same problem than me in more than 1200x1000 ?

http://vincent.zorzi.free.fr/bug_celestia.jpg

in waiting for a response,

Vinc'26

No problems on full screen mode at 1280x1024. All works great at that size. May be is your graphic card... Don't know.

Just another comment for HankR: why don't you look for a way to connect the Earth climate ( clouds ) to a server that shows the current moment as it happen in Starry Night or EarthBrowser? It could be a nice add.

Have to say too that I can't save the preferences, so when I open Celestia have always to set again some of them: an example, "view stars as points". This way the program runs better.

Hugs

Antonio

[Matt McIrvin]

Have to say too that I can't save the preferences, so when I open Celestia have always to set again some of them: an example, "view stars as points". This way the program runs better.

Yes, persistent preferences would be a major improvement.

[Vinc26]

Perhaps, the bug in large screen >1200 is only with gForce 4MX 64Mo...

So... it's a big bug for me !


Hank, when do you plane to share an another realase ?

In waiting, thanks for all.

[Bodkin]

I solved the problem. It now works for me... except for all those *other* bugs.

[HankR]

I'm planning to make another Mac OS X alpha release of Celestia 1.2.5 available shortly. This release will not include the data files (hence a much smaller, faster download). You'll have to copy the data files from the initial alpha release (they're inside the application package). Instructions for doing this will be in the README file with the new release.

Here's what's changed from the previous alpha version (mostly bugfixes):

- Moved data files to '~/Library/Application Support/CelestiaResources'

- Fixed problem loading compressed '.dds' texture files

- Fixed problem with nightside texture maps

- Fixed problem with picking objects on screen (courtesy Colin K.)

- Fixed problem with latitude/longitude in "Go To Object" dialog

- Fixed problem with jpeg images loading inverted

- Fixed problems with keyboard commands

- Fixed problem with garbage in initial display

- Fixed problem with logo display timing

- Added autosave for window location

- Updated "About" box info

- Changed to new icon

I'll let you know here when the release is ready for download from SourceForge.

- Hank

[Vinc26]

HankR : Do you know my "1280x1024" bug, like I explain before in this thread ?

That : http://vincent.zorzi.free.fr/bug_celestia.jpg

Apparently, I'm not alone with this display bug :
http://home.arcor.de/thorstenhechtfischer/Celestia.jpg

Thanks

[HankR]

Vinc26,

I haven't seen your problem on my system. My guess would be it is either a problem with the OpenGL driver on your hardware or a hardware resource issue, such as inadequate texture memory. The latter seems more likely to me, but it's just a guess.

You might try running Celestia using the 'OpenGL Profiler' application, which you'll find in '/Developer/Applications' if you've installed the Mac OS X Developer Tools. This utility displays a graph that shows various OpenGL driver parameters, including the amount of free VRAM. It's possible that this tool will give you a clue as to what is going on.

The other thing to do is to use the Terminal application to run Celestia from the command line. In Terminal, use 'cd <path>' to go to the directory where you've installed Celestia and type: './Celestia.app/Contents/MacOS/Celestia' (omit the quotes). This will let you see any error messages that Celestia may be generating.

- Hank

[TomTzart]

HankR : Do you know my "1280x1024" bug, like I explain before in this thread ?

That : http://vincent.zorzi.free.fr/bug_celestia.jpg

Apparently, I'm not alone with this display bug :
http://home.arcor.de/thorstenhechtfischer/Celestia.jpg

Thanks

Hi.
Here you are an example of a capture at the same screen's size ( 1280x1024 ), OS X.2.3 and the same graphic card ( Nvidia Geforce 4 MX with 64 Mb RAM ). So it must to be something on your computer ( may be something related with OpenGL as HankR has told you )

http://homepage.mac.com/tomtzart/PhotoAlbum2.html

Hugs

Antonio