Bright planets

[Nick]

I've just returned to Celestia after a several months, and have just upgraded to 1.3.0 from 1.2.4. All my planets are white or grey on the shadow side. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? I re-installed 1.2.4 into it's own celestia 124 folder, and everything works fine there. Returning to 1.3, the problem still exists. I've checked solarsys.ssc, and it seems fine. Any help greatly appreciated...

[jamarsa]

You seem to have a problem finding the textures. Check if you have a textures/medres folder from your main celestia 1.3.0 directory. Texture files should be there.

If this seems ok, please tell us what operating system&graphics card do you have.

[Nick]

When I was using 1.2.4 I'd downloaded higher resolution textures for various of the planets, and amended solarsys.ssc accordingly. With 1.3.0 to try to solve the problem I've made gone back to the original textures, (solarsys as per download) and have checked that there is a jpg in medres to match every reference in the .ssc. It's strange - the textures are there, you can see them, but washed out with a grey/white overlay. When you lok at the 'night' side of a planet, all you get is the grey/white wash. On the 'day' side, you see the washed-out texture, and the washing out increases as you approach the centre of the planet.

I'm using a DELL Inspiron 8100 laptop (1.4G) with it's own inbuilt NVIDIA GeForce2 Go (Dell mobile) driver, onto the inbuilt LCD screen running at 1600x1200. I run Celestia in windows mode with the window set to full screen. My OS is Win2000, with all updates and service packs.

[Phule]

it sounds like you have the ambient light feature on Medium. Go to the Render Menu and go down to Ambient Light and put it at low or none.

[chris]

This sounds like a known bug in the NVIDIA OpenGL drivers, and a bug in Celestia's detection of the driver bug. Does Saturn appear blue when you visit it? If so, you definitely need a driver update . . . For a Dell laptop, you probably need to visit the Dell site for the new driver--laptop drivers are handled by the various laptop vendors and not NVIDIA. If updating the driver isn't an option for you, you can use Ctrl+V to switch the render path to one that doesn't exhibit the bug (though you'll see less realistic images rendered.)

--Chris

[Nick]

Solution found - thanks a bundle, Chris! Yes, Saturn was blue, but a visit to Dell's site and an update to the latest driver now gives me perfect 1.3.0. I can now start to learn all the new features open to me. Thanks...