Celestia shade off; color problem

[DBrady]

Selden,

Do you not see the smoother transitions in the greens in the second image compared to the big 'lump' of one shade of green in the first? Its plainly evident on my monitor, mostly around brazil and peru.
I'll go look for the pulsar addon and see if i can recreate the other pictures.



Can anyone see it?

[Psykotik]

Hi Dbrady,

I've tried your solution, but it still doesn't fix my problem. Try with the Mira addons, to check if you have a correct colour display...

[DBrady]

I tried The mira addon and it looks to be the same as your picture. I really think thats the way its supposed to look though. Have you a picture anywhere of it looking different? ie. a smoother transition between the colour bands.

I guess my problem is different to yours. All i know is that using the desktop colour depth on my system makes all opengl programs render at 16 bit quality. I'm quite glad i fixed it for my system anyway. sorry to get your hopes up.

[Psykotik]

That damn Jeam has changed the pic's name

Here is how celestia should render Mira :



Again, browsing with Celestia 1.2.5pre6 works perfectly... something has been broken.

You can even do the test with PSR1257 addon, it's even more evident.

[selden]

Psykotik,

Exactly what is the name and location of the "Mira" addon you mean?

Please don't assume that the developers know each and every Addon by heart. There are just too many of them.

[Psykotik]

That's an old rassilon's addon. You can find it here : http://www.shatters.net/~rassilon/mira.zip as well as the Pulsar here : http://www.shatters.net/~rassilon/psr1257.zip.

[andyrock]

the south america thing works ok with nvidia linux drivers (6106) 32bit desktop and celestia picture quality is ok

[selden]

Psykotik,

I'm afraid you're going to explain why you think the picture you posted is "how Mira is supposed to look" and why you think v1.3.1final looks different from v1.3.2pre11 (for example).

Mira is a red giant, not blue.

You seem to be showing a picture of Veth in front of Rassilon's Mira B, illuminated over the observer's shoulder by Mira itself.

I see exactly the same images in both versions of Celestia, and, as best I can tell, both look almost exactly like what you've shown (allowing for the slightly different viewpoints).

Here's a screengrab of both versions of Celestia running simultaneously and showing exactly the same scene:



v1.3.2pre11 is on the left and v1.3.1-1final is on the right.

What am I overlooking?

Added slightly later:
here's a Web page that includes Cel URLs to take you to the viewpoint above:
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/veth.html

[Psykotik]

Selden, thanks for taking time with my problem. But as I see, it's OUR problem... since the pictures you provide have both a wrong colour display !

As I wrote before, you have to use at least 1.2.5 pre 6 (maybe it work with 1.2.5 final, I haven't checked yet) to have the right colours.

I have reinstalled that old release, and look at the result (sorry, screenshots position isn't the same as yours, I cannot follow anymore cel urls, I'm using opera browser lately) :



With a new version, it is exactly the same as you shoot :



As you can see, there IS a notable difference... and the same difference is noticeable for all plugins using this kind of "special effects"

[selden]

Psykotik,

Thanks for taking the time to point out the problem!

Digging through old versions of Celestia, I found that the smooth atmospheric gradation was OK as recently as V1.3.0 final and v1.3.1pre2.

I have two executables in the 131p2 folder, and the more recent, dated 18 May 2003, is OK.

It broke in Celestia v1.3.1pre3, dated 2 June 2003.

And it's still broken in today's cvs code

[Psykotik]

Well, that's a great news ! You have identified the problem ! You're the boss.

It took one year , but it can be fixed now, right ?

[selden]

Psykotik,

I found when it happened but not the exact problem.
Only Chris will be able to figure that out, unfortunately. I seem to recall that there were a lot of code changes around that time.

[chris]

I rewrote the atmosphere code last June, and that's the cause of the difference. One of the things I changed is to make the atmosphere falloff nonlinear, which looks better for planet atmospheres. So, I wouldn't say that anything is broken; atmospheres just aren't meant to be used for stellar coronas. I'm working on improved atmosphere and star glare rendering for the next version of Celestia, so in the future there should be no need to use extended atmospheres to make a star appear bright.

--Chris

[Psykotik]

I venture to recall this bug, since the 1.4 final is on the way...

[Juliux]

Excuse me for my bad english.
I have a Gigabyte mother GA-8S661FMX-F with on board SIS 3d card, 384 mb ddr 333 mhz, Pentium 4 Northwood, 2.4 Ghz, Wxp SP2 32bits, DirectX 9.0c, Open Gl 1.2

Celestia 1.2 work fine! My problem is with Celestia 1.4.1 or upper.
It don't shade. The planets seems like globes with light inside, without shading.
I quit the ambiental light, but dont work. What is happen?

More: Saturn seems like a tangerine!

I dont installed any add-on. Is Celestia 1.4.1 or 1.5 "nude".

Other questions: Where I can download a OpenGL Setup off line? Because I only have a dial-up line (115 kbps). Thus, I go to cybercafe, download "OpenGl Setup off-line" (like DirectX pack) and return my home for install it. I must get a "SIS OpenGl" or OpenGl is generic? (like DirectX?)

Thank you! I love Celestia!

Julius, Argentina.

[DT]

Celestia 1.2 work fine! My problem is with Celestia 1.4.1 or upper.
It don't shade. The planets seems like globes with light inside, without shading.
I quit the ambiental light, but dont work. What is happen?

This sounds like a hardware/driver issue.

Other questions: Where I can download a OpenGL Setup off line? Because I only have a dial-up line (115 kbps). Thus, I go to cybercafe, download "OpenGl Setup off-line" (like DirectX pack) and return my home for install it. I must get a "SIS OpenGl" or OpenGl is generic? (like DirectX?)

OpenGL support comes with the drivers for your video card. This can be a problem if the drivers are no longer being updated.

XP does not have built in support for OpenGL.

I tracked down your Motherboard and it appears the last full release for Graphics drivers was in May 2005 (v3.61a). Apart from that, there is only a beta driver that was released in Jan 2006 (v3.70).

http://www.giga-byte.co.uk/Support/Moth ... uctID=1734

This is most likely the source of your problems.

[selden]

XP does not have built in support for OpenGL.

This is false.

XP includes OpenGL software graphics drivers. You can use them by disabling 3D hardware acceleration in the Display Control Panel. It's only OpenGL v1.1, though, so you won't be able to see specular reflections or bumpmap shading, and, since it's implemented entirely in software, it'll be rather slow.

Please read the "Preliminary Celestia Users FAQ" which is available in the Celestia User's Forum. It includes instructions describing how to disable 3D hardware acceleration under Windows.

Sadly, SIS drivers are quite buggy and out of date.

[DT]

This is false.

XP includes OpenGL software graphics drivers. You can use them by disabling 3D hardware acceleration in the Display Control Panel. It's only OpenGL v1.1, though, so you won't be able to see specular reflections or bumpmap shading, and, since it's implemented entirely in software, it'll be rather slow.

Considering he's already running a OpenGL 1.2 hardware implementation, a software 1.1 implementation is hardly relevent and will only confuse the guy.

Juliux, you need new hardware.

[selden]

By disabling hardware acceleration, so that Microsoft's OpenGL drivers are used, one can verify that the problem actually is related to the graphics hardware.

Please read the FAQ.

[DT]

By disabling hardware acceleration, so that Microsoft's OpenGL drivers are used, one can verify that the problem actually is related to the graphics hardware.

Let me explain:

If there was a problem with hardware, at an electronics level, then it wouldn't be isolated to particular textures or features. It would cause the processor to cease functioning and the machine to lock up.

Celestia 1.2 works and 1.4.1 does not, when using OpenGL 1.2, then its most likely that Celestia is using commands his hardware does not support. Given the differences between OpenGL 1.1 and OpenGL 1.2, not only would it fail to perform the same function, it would fail to perform numerous other functions.

This will only confuse the situation as most end users wouldn't have a clue what to look for anyway.

At the end of the day, the solution is the same...buy new hardware.

Please read the FAQ.

The FAQ is out-of-date...OpenGL 1.1 was designed over 11 years ago.