Celestia160-ED Problem with some textures

[mauro.fraboni]

I have run the "World_of Celestia" Educational Activity but in some cases the images of Earth do not look correct.
I attach the cases.
Do you have any idea of the reason of the problem?

I Have 1GB of RAM and Radeon 9200 SE video card

thanks

[t00fri]

Mauro,

Problems with Celestia160-ED are primarily Frank Gregorio's business.. I fear he has never tested his ED stuff thoroughly under Linux. Superficially, from your above screenshots, I'd suspect an ATI driver problem (Linux!!) of which we had plenty in the past. I am sure you are using the latest available RADEON drivers?

But tell me, what happened to your previous problem after this considerable break??

Fridger

[selden]

I've seen a similar symptom under Windows with Nvidia graphics hardware (letters instead of a pictorial surface map) while developing some of my own Addons. It was caused by one or more surface texture image files being missing.

[mauro.fraboni]

I am running Celestia160-ED under windows and not Linux.
I will check the Radeon drivers.......I do not know if I have the last ones installed.
My problem is exactly as Selden described (I see letters/numbers instead of drawings), but I have downloaded World Of Celestia activity from the official Web Site...most of them are running correctly and only few of them have these kind of problems. If some files are missing could you help me to find which are and where could I find them?

[selden]

You can get some indication of what image files might be missing by turning on Celestia's "console log"
To see it, type a tilde (~). On European keyboards, you may need to type a space after the tilde.
Use up and down arrows to navigate in that log.
Type another tilde to turn it off.

The log entries can be somewhat misleading because it also complains about file specifications which have a wildcard (*) for the filetype. Those do actually work, but you'll have to verify that they're all there since exactly the same message is generated when they're missing.

[mauro.fraboni]

I installed updated version of my ATI Drivers and the problem was solved.
Thanks for your help.
ciao

[t00fri]

I installed updated version of my ATI Drivers and the problem was solved.
Thanks for your help.
ciao

Good! I had this ATI 9200 SE card in an old DELL laptop of mine and remember well the many driver issues with Celestia (, notably under Linux...)

Fridger

[mauro.fraboni]

how did you solve it in Linux? I have a dual boot installation here and with Windows now (after downloading new drivers from ATI) the image quality is very good, but in Linux is much worse and also performances of the system are much worse (I mean that it is much slower).
Do you remember if in Linux you were using default ATI driver (open source) or ATI Proprietary Linux Driver

thanks

[t00fri]

how did you solve it in Linux? I have a dual boot installation here and with Windows now (after downloading new drivers from ATI) the image quality is very good, but in Linux is much worse and also performances of the system are much worse (I mean that it is much slower).
Do you remember if in Linux you were using default ATI driver (open source) or ATI Proprietary Linux Driver

thanks

Yes, in the end, I had to take recourse to the ATI driver (radeon) of the Linux xorg distribution. Depending on the version, the ATI proprietary driver was much less stable and had more bugs, notably in connection with Celestia. The radeon driver was still fast enough for a half-way decent display. Celestia represents a tough testing ground for OpenGL drivers and actually has been used in the past as a OpenGL testing tool by ATI

Unlike the unified architecture (for all OS) of the NVIDIA drivers, ATI has never put high priority into the development of its cross-platform OpenGL support. The (Windows) drivers for the modern ATI cards are said to be much more reliable and largely bug-free (compared to the earlier ones).

Fridger