No eclipse shadows using .cms or .3ds models

[JackHiggins]

Today I was adding a few extra binary asteroids that i'd found online, & realised there was something missing with the ones that orbit very close together- no eclipse shadows!

.cms or.3ds don't cast any eclipse shadows, or at least they don't for me... Here are 2 pics to illustrate what I mean:

First, the asteroids as spheres, without any mesh specified:


now, the asteroids with a mesh of roughsphere.cms in the ssc file:


My specs are:
Geforce 4 MX440
Win98SE
Pentium 4 1.7GHz
127MB RAM

Is there any way to improve this in the next version...?!!

[selden]

Jack,

It's somewhat difficult to reproduce your problem without their ssc definitions..

[HankR]

I believe that Celestia does not attempt to cast shadows from models because of their irregular shapes. It only casts shadows from objects that are spherical, which greatly simplifies the problem of creating the shadows (they're always cones).

There are techniques that could be used to generate shadows from models, but they're not trivial and have not (yet?) been implemented in Celestia. Maybe someday, but I wouldn't expect to see them in the next version.

- Hank