1.3.2pre 10 still has model display problems

[Guest]

Hi everyone. I just downloaded rthorvald's magnificent Billow Maidens add-on. It is very elaborate and very very well done. However, I discovered that when viewing some of his complex models, Celestia 1.3.2pre 10fix is causing them to blink/flash on and off from a variety of distances. The effect does NOT occur with 1.3.1.

As an example, here are two scenes from a view of some mining stations hovering above a planet. There are supposed to be six stations. Notice in scene 1 that only 3 stations and no cloud layer is present. Just 2 seconds later, without me moving my position at all, there are 6 floating mines and the cloud layer has now appeared. As you watch, these mining stations and the cloud layer blinks on and off constantly, from a variety of distances. It obviously ruins the model's enjoyment.







Several of his other model meshes are doing this. It is distressing to see these models blinking on and off. They are great, Celestia is great, and everything should work in 1.3.2 as well or better than 1.3.1.

Chris, please help!

I am using a Nvidia Geforce4 TI 4200 with 128 MB video RAM.

Frank

[fsgregs]

Oops - forgot to login. The above post is mine.

Frank

[chris]

I've observed similar rendering errors in several places in the Ran add-on. I'm working on a fix.

--Chris

[chris]

Most of the problems should be fixed in this EXE:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/ ... 11-exe.zip

--Chris

[fsgregs]

Chris:

YES! The fix worked. the models no longer blink. Thanks for your insight and skills.

The only problem I see left with 1.3.2 is the font display, as Don Goyette mentioned in another post. I changed my screen resolution to 1024 x 768 x 32 bit, and the fonts are barely readable. In fact, letters are missing from some of the text. It seems worse in 1.3.2pre11, but that might be my imagination. Also, the position of the left-hand text is right at the edge of my screen, even when I adjust my monitor. The left margin position of the text now seems to be at "zero".

Here is a screenshot:




Its hard to read (very dim). Also notice the position of text at the edge of the left margin, and the missing letters "L" in the word follow.

Regards,

Frank

[selden]

Frank,

Do you have anti-aliasing enabled in your display properties menu? If so, turn it off. Select "controlled by application" and then include this line in celestia.cfg

AntialiasingSamples 4

This should fix the problem of individual letters being damaged, but not the positioning problem.

[fsgregs]

Selden:



That did it. I set my display monitor at antialiasing controlled by application and inserted the line in the cfg file. The letters are now bright enough and are quite readable. They still touch the left margin, but oh well!

I have no idea what your instructions did. I know antialiasing controls the drawing of lines, but ....

1. what is the range of values for sampling Antialiasing? What does "AntialiasingSamples 4" mean?

2. Also, in Celestia.cfg, the information text font size is set at "12" point. If I change it to 16, will the letters be bigger on the screen?

3. One last short question. Is there a cfg command line that will cause Celestia to always launch itself in high-res mode? It does not remember that I prefer highres so every time I start it, I have to hit the Shift+R keys to switch to high-res. Can a cfg command do that instead?

Thanks for your great help!

Frank

[selden]

Frank,

Chris added the antialiasing code into Celestia two nights ago, so I knew it'd be available in pre11

1) The new antialiasing code normally is disabled because it isn't available for some older graphics cards. "AntialiasingSamples 4" means whatever "4" means for the card you have. Most modern cards can go as high as 8. Higher values tell the graphics card to do a better job of smoothing (filtering) the colors of the pixels along edges so the edges don't look so jagged, but also cause the graphics card to do more computations, and thus run more slowly. And hotter!

2) The fontnames actually correspond to the names of files that are in Celestia's fonts folder. You can specify any of the files that are there. The numeric suffix does correspond to the size, but not all sizes are available. Unfortunately, some of the font files seem to be missing some of the nonASCII characters that are used in some Constellation names.

3) Sorry: so far as I know, the current version of Celestia doesn't have any way to remember the texture resolution setting. I agree that it would be nice if it did, although I'd prefer that it be remembered in the same way as other dynamic settings, not in the .cfg file.