Celestia 1.4.0pre6 for Mac OS X

[dirkpitt]

I've uploaded a build of Celestia 1.4.0pre6 for Mac OS X:

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creators/dirkpitt/celestia-osx-1.4.0pre6.dmg

This version will be incompatible with your existing star files. Please backup your existing
CelestiaResources folder and use the new CelestiaResources from 1.4.0. Previous extras and
textures can be copied over and used like before.

Major changes since 1.3.2 are:
- Has most of the 1.4.0pre6 bug fixes from the cross-platform code
- Browser for solar system and stars added (Hank)
- Cel url launching and celx scripts work (Hank)
- Rainbow bumpmap issue fixed
- Preferences saved properly (Hank)
- Mouse wheel and right-click for context menu work
- Optimized slightly for G5

Differences from Windows version:
- OpenGL 2.0 path not implemented (Apple needs to update their video drivers)
- Full-screen mode, still and movie capture as yet unimplemented

Developer-friendly changes are:
- Fully-operational and up-to-date Xcode project
- Deployment build automatically creates r/w dmg
- All static libraries converted to dynamic, PNG library updated to most recent

Currently, a minor issue exists in that your 1.3.2 preferences won't be carried over since a
different preferences file is used. But since the 1.3.2 preferences file didn't really save all your
settings, this is probably not such a big loss...I hope

Cheers,
DW

[Cham]

Dirkpitt,

I just downloaded this new version 10 minutes ago, on an all new eMac with 1 GB ram and OS X 10.3.7. After the software start-up, it totally freeze when it tries to reach the Earth !

It's a total, fatal, crash. Even the mouse cursor freeze on the screen. I have to shut down the computer and start it again. So there's a nasty bug here.

This is occuring on two new eMac. It appears to be related to the video card (I don't know which one, I'll check this later, but I think it's an ATI).

[Cham]

Okay, I just checked the two eMacs here at work. They are both using OS X 10.3.7 with 512 + 256 MB of RAM, and an ATI video card with 32 MB of VRAM. I tried your vanilla version of Celestia, without any addon. And it systematically crash the computer when the software try to reach the Earth at startup.

Sad.

[dirkpitt]

Okay, I just checked the two eMacs here at work. They are both using OS X 10.3.7 with 512 + 256 MB of RAM, and an ATI video card with 32 MB of VRAM. I tried your vanilla version of Celestia, without any addon. And it systematically crash the computer when the software try to reach the Earth at startup.

Sad.

The eMac has a Radeon 9200. It seems like a driver-related issue -- I'll investigate this asap. Meanwhile,
machines on which this build *does* work include the iMac G5 (nvidia fx5200), titanium PowerBooks (ati rage 128),
dual G4 (nvidia geforce 4mx), and aluminum PowerBook (radeon 9700).

[dirkpitt]

Okay, I just checked the two eMacs here at work. They are both using OS X 10.3.7 with 512 + 256 MB of RAM, and an ATI video card with 32 MB of VRAM. I tried your vanilla version of Celestia, without any addon. And it systematically crash the computer when the software try to reach the Earth at startup.

Sad.

The eMac has a Radeon 9200. It seems like a driver-related issue -- I'll investigate this asap. Meanwhile,
machines on which this build *does* work include the iMac G5 (nvidia fx5200), titanium PowerBooks (ati rage 128),
dual G4 (nvidia geforce 4mx), and a`luminum PowerBook (radeon 9700).

[dirkpitt]

Okay, I just checked the two eMacs here at work. They are both using OS X 10.3.7 with 512 + 256 MB of RAM, and an ATI video card with 32 MB of VRAM. I tried your vanilla version of Celestia, without any addon. And it systematically crash the computer when the software try to reach the Earth at startup.

Sad.

The eMac has a Radeon 9200. It seems like a driver-related issue -- I'll investigate this asap. Meanwhile,
machines on which this build *does* work include the iMac G5 (nvidia fx5200), titanium PowerBooks (ati rage 128),
dual G4 (nvidia geforce 4mx), and a`luminum PowerBook (radeon 9700).

[alphap1us]

Hi,
I tested this version on a Power mac G4 Cube. It did not crash when viewing Earth, but after I moved from Mars back to Earth, I took the following screenshot.



Whatever happens on the screen is reflected on the surface of Earth! I didn't check, but I assume the cube had an ATi Rage 128, the facotry default installed. It was running 10.3.7

I'll also check tonight and my iBook 800.
Thanks Dirkpitt and Hank Ramsey for this new build.

Cheers,
Joe

[Cham]

I tested the new built on a very old iMac (ATI card 128 rage), with OS X 10.3.7 and 512 MB ram. The new version of Celestia is working (no crashes), but immediately after startup, it get to the Earth and gives exactly the same image as the one above from alphap1us post.

I also tried my latest black hole addon on this iMac, which is using billboard planes with png transparent pictures, and the textures aren't showing properly.

[dirkpitt]

Bazookas! I have a theory about why this happens on some Rage 128's, but the Radeon 9200
has me stumped. Are you seeing these bugs for the first time? I heard that the 9200
didn't work so hot with Celestia 1.3.2 either, so just need to confirm that the issue is new.

[Cham]

Dirkpitt,

I just installed the new version on my G4 dual 867 MHz here at home (OS X 10.3.3, 1.5 GB RAM, ATI 9800 Pro 128 MB VRAM). Well, I'm experiencing some problems with this version.

1- I'm having some drawing problems with all my models. Here's an example on the Cassini dish. You can see some huge pixelised effect, or jaggies here. On some other models, the mesh appears to have some cuts, or missaligned pieces.



2-Also, rotating view is now very laggy. When I try to rotate just to look at the sky with its stars (no nebulae), I get some "spikes" in the animation. It's jumpy, or laggy.

I never experienced those problems on your previous personal compilation that you gave me two months ago. Rotating the sky was perfectly smooth, no lags. So I'm forced to revert to my previous 1.4 unofficial version.

By the way, here are some comments :

1- The "Ok" button showing on the startup (loading sequence) dialog box is totally useless, and should be removed for simplicity, like on your previous personal version.

2- The "Favorite" and the "Browser" windows should remember their last position, if you quit and restart Celestia.

3- Please O PLEASE ! make a separate option to show galaxies and DSC nebulae. It's actually a total pain in the butt to show both at the same time.

Question : can we also browse addons in the Browser ? Is it limited to what it's showing right now ?

[Adreitz]

This new version is great, dirkpitt! Normal maps look awesome now, especially the VT normal map for Mars. The only drawing glitch I've seen so far has been Ganymede with a normal map ?€” for some reason, the normal map isn't being interpreted correctly, and most of Ganymede looks black. It's almost as if parts of the surface are being masked. When I turn up the diffuse light (I keep it on 0 because of the ring texture problems), though, I can see all features of the surface map again. Weird.

I have also seen the "hitching" problem that Cham talked about. When moving around in Celestia now, things will move smoothly, suddenly pause, and then move smoothly again. It's almost as if Celestia were pausing while loading new texture sections from disk, but it didn't do this in the previous version (I'm talking about planets with normal textures, not VTs).

Other than those two things, Celestia seems to be running better than great. Nice job!

Aaron

[chris]

Cham:

The problem seen in your screen shot is due to low z buffer precision--I think that 16-bit instead of 24-bit Z is being used. Dirkpitt: I think that the problem is in CelestiaOpenGLView.m. The pixel format attribute list has a 1 following NSOpenGLPFADepthSize--I think that you should 24 instead.

Separate nebula and galaxy controls: yes, it's a good idea. Adding a separate bit for nebulae will break some cel:// URLs, but I think it's necessary. It will also require updating all the GUIs with a new checkbox.

--Chris

[hank]

The problem seen in your screen shot is due to low z buffer precision--I think that 16-bit instead of 24-bit Z is being used. Dirkpitt: I think that the problem is in CelestiaOpenGLView.m. The pixel format attribute list has a 1 following NSOpenGLPFADepthSize--I think that you should 24 instead.

Thanks, Chris. I can confirm that seems to fix the problem.

- Hank

[hank]

Cham and Adreitz,

You might try pressing the "~" key to turn on display of the texture loading messages in order to see if the jumping or hitching events are due to texture loading.

- Hank

[Marco]

Dirkpitt, Hank

I use a Radeon 9200 on an iBook G4 933 MHz with 640 MB RAM. OS X 10.3.7, newest driver for Radeon 9200 (from two weeks ago) installed.

I'm encountering the same problems as Cham on his eMac.

Older versions of Celestia worked quite well, but I had to disable the bumpmaps because they crashed the system. There were some minor problems as well (flickering galaxies, ring shadows randomly on/off or with spikes), but they were not bothering me that much.

I really hope that you will find out what's the problem with Radeon 9200, I'm looking forwards to bumpmaps and normal maps in Celestia for such a long time (never saw them because most people I know have a Mac)!

Thanks for your work, please let me know if there's something I can try out on my iBook to find out what's wrong.

[hank]

1- The "Ok" button showing on the startup (loading sequence) dialog box is totally useless, and should be removed for simplicity, like on your previous personal version.

2- The "Favorite" and the "Browser" windows should remember their last position, if you quit and restart Celestia.

3- Please O PLEASE ! make a separate option to show galaxies and DSC nebulae. It's actually a total pain in the butt to show both at the same time.

Question : can we also browse addons in the Browser ? Is it limited to what it's showing right now ?

Cham,

1 - The "Ok" button is not totally useless. It can be used to close the dialog box. It's unnecessary perhaps, or practically useless, but not totally useless. My intent has been to replace it with a "Cancel" button which would quit Celestia immediately. (I've wanted to do that once or twice.) But I haven't considered it a high priority. If it really bugs you, you can remove the button using Interface Builder.

2 - This should be easily doable.

3 - Chris has covered this above. When it's implemented in the core we'll add it to the Mac GUI.

(4) - The Browser doesn't discriminate with respect to add-ons. But it only shows a limited number of objects in each category, so the objects in a given add-on may or may not be included. This browser is an experimental implementation and will likely be improved over time.

- Hank

[Adreitz]

Hey, guys. I haven't tested pressing ~ yet, but I don't think this relates to texture loading or any other sort of busyness on Celestia's part. I think it's actually a problem with the interpretation of mouse control. Last night, after posting, I downloaded Cham's three black hole addons (quite good!), and I noticed that even though the framerate was consistently high ?€” 20 to 30 fps ?€” I still got the hitching. Futhermore, the black holes were still animated even when the camera wasn't following the mouse movements! It seems now that Celestia isn't properly detecting mouse movement for a while (possibly until a certain "threshold" is reached in the distance traveled by the cursor after clicking down in the Celestia window?) and then all that movement is suddenly recovered and the camera jumps to the new position. It's actually more annoying when Celestia has high frame rates than when it has low frame rates, because the hitching is more noticeable. I spend most of my time in our SS in Celestia, where I have tons of huge textures loaded, so I hadn't noticed this at first.

Aaron

[rthorvald]

The "Ok" button is not totally useless. It can be used to close the dialog box. It's unnecessary perhaps, or practically useless, but not totally useless. My intent has been to replace it with a "Cancel" button which would quit Celestia immediately. (I've wanted to do that once or twice.) But I haven't considered it a high priority.

Personally, i would prefer a splash screen to the dialog...

Btw, just installed the new version on an imac G5, and it works beatufully. Haven??t come across any bugs yet, exept for a problem that still persists from the earlier versions: rings are rendered extremely dark under all rendering paths exept for "multitexture". This problem is visible on my imac (nvidia 5200), but not on my powerbook (ati radeon 7500).

-rthorvald

PS: thank you for the release!

[dirkpitt]

Hi,
I tested this version on a Power mac G4 Cube. It did not crash when viewing Earth, but after I moved from Mars back to Earth, I took the following screenshot.

(dirkpitt: omitted for brevity)

Whatever happens on the screen is reflected on the surface of Earth! I didn't check, but I assume the cube had an ATi Rage 128, the facotry default installed. It was running 10.3.7

I'll also check tonight and my iBook 800.
Thanks Dirkpitt and Hank Ramsey for this new build.

Cheers,
Joe

A workaround is to switch to low-res textures (hit the lowercase 'r' key). The actual problem
seems to be caused by insufficient vram and doesn't seem like a new problem that has
cropped up in this release. I'll be doing some more tests tomorrow.

Edited Wed Jan 26:
An even better workaround is to switch your monitor to Thousands of Colors. There will be
banding artifacts in some textures, but wouldn't you agree that this is better than getting a
screenshot pasted on your planets?

[Cham]

dirkpitt,

on my system (dual G4 867 MHz, OS X 10.3.3 with ATI radeon 9800 Pro), your previous version (the one you gave me two or three months ago) is FAR superior than this new release.

In the "old" version, there are only few minor bugs (I already made some reports to you, two months ago). Now, with the new version, I'm experiencing major screw up, like the models rendering which are all messed up, and those very annoying glitches (lags) while rotating the view.

I hope you'll find the bugs without too much efforts.