Downgrade to before 3.x?

[CitizenZed]

Seriously..... I have never been able to run Celestia since it got past 2.whatever before 3.x

Never can find an old version.

The new stuff is just always choppy.....never runs smoothly and seizes up all the time. I've got an pretty good Nvidia Card, 512 Ram and XP Pro with a 1gig Athlon Thunderbird...........sorry I'm not up to speed.

I used to like Celestia. Can anyone send me an older installation file or tell me where to find it. Choppiness really sux.

[Oni2501]

You might be able to find what you're looking for here:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/%7Eclaurel/celestia/files/

[selden]

Citizen Zed,

You need to be explicit about what kind of graphics card you have, how much memory it has, and what version of Nvidia drivers you're using. This would make it possible for people to make some explicit recommendations.

Also, please describe what Addons you have in your "standard" configuration, especially the ones that seem to cause the jerkiness. Large surface textures, of course, will tend to be slower to load. As objects come in to view, Celestia will tend to pause while it loads their textures.

Some generic comments:
As Celestia has evolved, Chris has tended to take advantage of more of the advanced features available in the most recent OpenGL standards. Older cards don't have the hardware to directly support those features. In some cases Nvidia's newer drivers have included software routines to implement those functions.
Celestia tries to take advantage of the most advanced graphics features that the drivers claim to support. Naturally, software implementations are much slower than direct support in the hardware would be.

If at all possible, you really should consider upgrading your graphics card. Prices on the FX5200 have come down significantly. The last time I checked, just before the 6800 was announced, it was available for less than U.S. $60. I suspect prices are even lower now.

I hope this helps a little.

[CitizenZed]

Thanks for the observations.......... and the link above. Basically I'm just amazed that I can't run the program any more. Don't have any add-ons...And, insofar as it doesn't lock up soon upon encountereing all the stuff orbiting Jupiter, I turn off all kinds of stuff............. still, choppy and too annoying to use.

This is on two machines mind you. Both 512 Ram, one Athlon 1.33 gig another Athlon 1 gig..... two different vid cards. Matrox G-450 dual and a Nvidia somesuch with a shload of itsown ram (what's explicit is that neither can handle the program apparently). Yeah, I may upgrade, however, it would be nice to find an older version without running into dead ends - especially for those of us who don't want to haggle on the perpetual fronteirs of techno fetishism.

Call it Celestia light or something.

Also............ an idea (yeah, I know it probably doesn't fit the "lite" scheme I'm harping on): One wants to be able to see a horizon, as if standing anywhere on earth (abstract is OK)..... and see the sky. Also cool if you could take a position at the Earth's core and have Earth transparent.......... where' you could have a faint' view of continents and cities as you look out.

[selden]

Citizen,

Older versions of Celestia for Windows, back to 1.0.10, are available on SourceForge at the bottom of the page at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21302

My guess is that texture loading is a lot slower than it used to be. I dunno why. You might test to see if it's related to the new wildcard options: edit \data\solarsys.ssc and change the .* file types (for Jupiter?) with .JPG or .PNG to match exactly the names of the textures in the directory \textures\medres\

Or just copy over solarsys.ssc from an eariler version of Celestia.

Does that reduce the severity of the pauses?

As for your Also...

See the "Preliminary User's FAQ" at the top of the User's Forum, Q/A#19 to learn how to use Celestia v1.3.x as a planetarium.

An Addon whch lets you view the continents from the inside would be "trivial" with the current version of Celestia. It'd be only a 3D spherical model with inward pointing normals and which uses the Alpha channel for transparency instead of specularity. It'd probably take about 15 minutes to create.

[Guest]

Well, I got my work machine to work well with version 1.2.5

But home...........ack: 1.2.5 freezes right before Io resolves. I've tried 1.2.4 and 1.2.3 and everything is choppy and, well, unusable.

512 ram............Nvidia GeForce 2Ti..... 1gig Athlon processor. Win XP Pro.

I know there's a bugs section.... but I look at it and it seems I'd have to devote a good portion of my life in order to try and make it work. Is there any primer on getting Celestia to work smoothly....prioritized list of shit to checkl? I swear 1.2.3 worked well when I was at half the present RAM in Win 2000. Is there a list of problem video cards?

Or should I wait until I have a machine that isn't 4 years old ...with a ultra modern video card?

[wasj2004]

Im no super computer wiz, but I can tell you what worked for me. My old computer sounds about like yours, and of all the upgrades I did to it, more ram made the biggest difference. before I added more ram i was running 512 and it was real choppy, always locking up on approach to planets, jupiter especially! older versions of celestia went to jupiter on startup and that was as far as it went! when I upped the 512 to 1 gig it made all the diffence in the world. it would still get a little choppy on certain planets but it totaly solved the lockup problem. Hope this helps!

[Bob Hegwood]

Don't mean to rain on the parade, but my humble 256 MB non-graphically enhanced
machine runs the latest versions of Celestia with absolutely no problems.
This makes me think that either your graphics drivers are causing the problems,
or something else specific to your system needs some tweaking. Don't have a
clue what that might be, but I just thought I'd mention it. Usually, if *my*
machine can handle a program, then anyone's can. You've downloaded the
very latest video drivers and all that?

Take care, Bob

[Bob Hegwood]

One other thought, just to see if we can narrow down the problem...
What sizes/types are the textures your using for Jupiter? Are you simply
using the standard default textures which come with Celestia? Or, have you
added a whopping huge texture from somewhere else?

Sorry... Just trying to be helpful.

Take care, Bob