New UNOFFICIAL OS X Celestia Build (6-29-05)

[BlindedByTheLight]

Since doctorjoe has kindly tweaked his Celestia patches (and added a few more) I thought I would make a new build available. I don't have a complete list of his additions b/c the site is down now but, if memory serves, he made a new orbit interpolator, fixed a bad memory leak and enabled Celestia to run on some older graphics cards (I'm not sure which).

Also, I took the liberty of adding keyboard short-cuts to the orbit selection menu. This way, you don't have to drop out of full-screen mode or use the mouse to turn off, say, planet orbits or comet orbits individually. A simple COMMAND+SHIFT+P will toggle the planet orbits. COMMAND+SHIFT+A will toggle asteroid orbits and so on. It's actually REALLY cool - and I'm hoping someone makes it a part of the main code so other non-Mac users can enjoy.

The goods are available here:

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7457

Please read all the caveats for this UNOFFICIAL build.

Thanks,
Steve

[ElChristou]

Many Tx Steven,

Bye

[BlindedByTheLight]

NOTE TO ALL: I did NOT include the new "foreground orbit fix" that doctorjoe included since my last build - mostly b/c on my computer it created such thick jagged orbit lines. So the orbit "double-lines" orbit problem...

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=55856#55856

...MAY have been fixed in that patch, it's just that this new 6-29 version still has the old patch. However, note this "old patch" does fix the "no orbit lines IN FRONT of planets".

Thank you and enjoy!

[doctorjoe]

Also does the problem exist if you turn off smooth rendering.

[BlindedByTheLight]

Also does the problem exist if you turn off smooth rendering.

Not sure... I will investigate this and let you know. Thanks.

[BlindedByTheLight]

opengl has switches to turn on and off things like line smoothing, and its easy to mess up the switches, which is what I think happened.

If you can apply last nights patches, and give me a screen shot, I can fix the problem.

Also does the problem exist if you turn off smooth rendering.

I applied all patches and tried toggling "line smoothing". Certainly, that makes a difference - but the general problem of the lines being considerably thicker still remains.

This is with the latest patches (with line smoothing ON):



This is with the latest patches (with line smoothing OFF):



This is with your original orbit lines patch:



Note - you may need to download these photos and view at 100% to really see what I'm talking about.

But the old orbit lines were thin and nice... the new ones, whether or not smoothing is on, seem fairly ugly looking "lines" - at least to my eyes (though it's kinda hard to tell with the angle I took with the old patch)... whaddya think?

[doctorjoe]

Let me look into this.....

The "thick lines" were unintentional.......

[doctorjoe]

The problem came about when I accidentally turned off "blending" of lines. This makes the smooth lines look awful because smooth lines depend on the ability to "smear" an orbit with the background.

That problem is fixed. But there is some "pulsing" which happens when one orbit gets drawn on other and you get this blending.

But that bug was also in my unaltered version of 1.4pre6

[doctorjoe]

If you see any thing that looks "wrong", it probably is.

[Rich]

Hi,
Is it me or does the 6-29 build not work with OS X 10.2.8 as the 6-13 build does? I launch the 6-29 and nothing happens...

I'll be upgrading to 10.4 very soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd ask!


Thanks,
Rich

[Startyger]

Celestia on a mini (1.4x) works nicely... in fact the best i've seen! Then again.. i was coming from a G4 466 mini tower.. but it had a 128MB video card! and 768MB of RAM... so, it works okay, but the mini has a faster processor.. (and a gig of DDRRAM doesn't hurt) thanks again... looking to try some add ons... now.. where's that black hole... 18 Sco...