Celestia stops working after a few minutes

[mhguda]

Hi,
I used Celestia before under windows XP, never had any problems. But now that I've moved to Windows 7 and am trying the new version here, the program stops working after a few minutes, and then is shut down. (a dialog box pops up saying Celestia has stopped working, and the only options are closing the program in some form or other). The only information about the cause of this is A problem has stopped Celestia from working correctly. I have not seen anything like this reported on the forum or in the FAQ. Can anyone help me resolve this problem? Thanks in advance.

[selden]

Please try downloading and installing the most recent graphics driver from the manufacturer of your graphics hardware.

This type of error usually is caused by using a buggy graphics driver. Drivers provided by Microsoft are usually far out of date. As a test, you might try disabling all graphics hardware acceleration. Although it's slow and lacking in features, Microsoft's software OpenGL drivers usually work OK.

What make and model of graphics hardware do you have?

[mhguda]

Thanks for writing. I have just bought an NVidia GeForce 6200 and gotten the latest drivers from NVidia's web site. None of my other applications that make use of its graphic capabilities give me any problem like this, so I'm inclined to think it's Celestia's problem. I cannot find an option for Celestia to temporarily turn off hardware acceleration, which I would expect. (Google earth has it, for example, and I've used it in the past). Is there a "safe mode" for Celestiia?
So that the rest of my system would not have to be set to "slow graphics" mode.

[selden]

Celestia has several different levels of graphics support, all of which use whatever hardware capabilities are provided by your computer. Type a Control-V to step through them.

To disable hardware acceleration under Windows, right-mouse-click on the "desktop" background.
Select Properties --> Settings --> Advanced --> Troubleshoot
and move the Hardware acceleration slider all the way to the left.

[mhguda]

The Nvidia control panel seems to take over this function from windows, and I could not start the troubleshooter. But it gave me per-application options, and I tried turning off all the nice-sounding options such as anisotropic filtering, antialiasing, and a host more. Turning off most of them and choosing performance over quality did help some - it gave me a longer working time and I could move out of the galaxy. However trying to go back home crashed Celestia - I'm still out in inter-galactic space... and no other application has caused anything like this.
I also tried running in xp compatibility mode. Same result - Celestia will last a little longer than before, but it will crash.

[selden]

Have you tried reducing Celestia's graphics demands by typing a Control-V while Celestia is running and before it crashes?
"Basic" rendering uses the fewest features. "OpenGL V2" uses the most.

What object are you trying to view when it crashes?
Different OpenGL v2 features are being exercised depending on which planet is involved.
e.g. Viewing the Earth requires specular reflections but not surface normal maps.
Viewing the Moon or Mars requires surface normal maps but not specular reflections.

[mhguda]

Yes I have tried that. In fact it crashed the fastest with Basic.
I was looking at the deep sky when it crashed. When it lasted longest, I was looking at the Milky Way from far enough outside to see the whole spiral. It crashed when I tried to center on another star.
But after a while, just moving out from the solar system would crash me.
I tried in both windowed and full screen modes. It makes no difference.

[CAP-Team]

I've had problems with running Celestia in the past, then it was my computer power supply that couldn't handle the graphic card load.