Another preview - cloud shadows

[Cham]

Of course I'm using OGL 2, or else the new atmosphere wont work.

[selden]

Does anyone with an ATI card under Windows (or Linux) see the same problem that Cham sees?

Cloudshadows work fine on my Nvidia card.

There was some previous discussion about changes being needed to some of [edit]Celestia's OpenGL 2 vertex and pixel routines [/edit] to produce somewhat more compatible code. I don't know if that ever happened.

[t00fri]

Of course I'm using OGL 2, or else the new atmosphere wont work.

Then just assign another key in that script. perhaps there is a collision for you OS-X guys.

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

Then just assign another key in that script. perhaps there is a collision for you OS-X guys.

I don't think there's a collision, because the capital-V works (gives me that colorfull garbage around the window, deep blue, and slowness !


EDIT : And who in the community is using OS X with OGL2 ? ElChristou don't have OGL2 enabled on his system. Am I the only one who can test that, on OS X ?

[t00fri]

Then just assign another key in that script. perhaps there is a collision for you OS-X guys.

I don't think there's a collision, because the capital-V works (gives me that colorfull garbage around the window, deep blue, and slowness !


EDIT : And who in the cimmunity is using OS X with OGL2 ? ElChristou don't have OGL2 enabled on his system.

How about DW (Dirkpitt), Hank ?

[selden]

I finally found the thread that discussed the ogl2 shader problem that I was thinking about:
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10024&

Chris wrote that he was going to fix it, though, so presumably that isn't the problem.

[selden]

Cham,

All I think we know is that MacOS with a particular ATI card has problems.

I don't recall seeing anything either way from anyone running current MacOS with an Nvidia card

nor from anyone running Windows with the same ATI card that you have.

I've forgotten which model of ATI card you have. Could you repeat it here, please, along with the version of MacOS that you're running?

[Cham]

I'm using the latest version of OS X (Tiger 10.4.7) with ATI Radeon x850 XT (256 MB vram).

The computer has 4 GB ram, two 2.0 GHz G5 processors. The ATI card I have is the most powerfull available for the G5.

Most Celestia users here with a Mac have an ATI card. Chris has a powerbook with an ATI card too, if I recall.

[Cham]

I've done some more tests :

I considerably reduced the textures used (I was using 4k PNG textures for Earth base texture, bumps map, night map, clouds map and specular map before, so I guess my STUPID ATI CARD was already on its knees).

Well, I'm experiencing the same problem after using the capital-V command : deep blue and slowness, even with the low resolution maps (1k and 2k).

After that, I turned OFF bump map, night map and specular map in Earth's SSC. Using the capital-V command gave me some weird shadows. With the 1k clouds, the shadows weren't even recognisable. With the 4k clouds, the shadows were all distorded and had many artifacts. Of course, the clouds speed is set to 0 (so I could use my 4k clouds anyway).

This really sucks.

[chris]

I just checked in the change that allows you to toggle cloud shadows on and off in the Windows view options dialog. I'd had the change sitting around for over a month and completely forgotten that I hadn't actually checked it in.

I happen to think the cloud shadows look pretty good with Don's 4k cloud map. There's still a glitch in the shadows that occurs wherever the textures are split. Yet another thing to fix . . . It's not a simple fix either. It involves changing how texture coordinates are generated in the planet renderer. I've got plans to completely rewrite that code after 1.5.0, so I'm not thrilled about making significant modifications to it now only to throw away the code in a few months.

I'm considering implementing cube map clouds and having cloud shadow textures work only with them. With cube map clouds, the inverse trig functions (there's a arctan2 and an arcsin in the rectangular to spherical conversion) aren't required, so cloud shadows can be *much* faster. Or, I might just disable cloud shadows whenever texture splitting is necessary.

--Chris

[Cham]

However, I just discovered that the slowGo is actually VERY usefull as a FastGo (with a parameter changed from 15 to 0.001) ! This should be in the official version. Shift-G (capital G) instantaneously go to the selected object. This is a very nice alternate way to go for the impatient !

[t00fri]

However, I just discovered that the slowGo is actually VERY usefull as a FastGo (with a parameter changed from 15 to 0.001) ! This should be in the official version. Shift-G (capital G) instantaneously go to the selected object. This is a very nice alternate way to go for the impatient !

Indeed that's useful for testing! In particular travelling to galaxies ...is instantaneous. You are about to discover the charm of CELX scripting

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

You are about to discover the charm of CELX scripting

Bye Fridger

True. There's a huge powerfull monster under the hood, in Celestia, and I underexploit it.

How can I add that little celx script to Celestia's config files (start.cel ?) so that the capital-G key shortcut is ON permanently, without having to call for that celx file each time by hand ?

[t00fri]

You are about to discover the charm of CELX scripting

Bye Fridger

True. There's a huge powerfull monster under the hood, in Celestia, and I underexploit it.

How can I add that little celx script to Celestia's config files (start.cel ?) so that the capital-G key shortcut is ON permanently, without having to call for that celx file each time by hand ?

Just replace the start.cel script by a start.celx script that you wrote in Lua. Then you quote the location of start.celx in celestia.cfg. I have all scripts in a directory 'scripts', for example.

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

But then, how do you inlude all the stuff from the start.cel into that new start.celx ?

[Vincent]

But then, how do you inlude all the stuff from the start.cel into that new start.celx ?

Cham,

You can use the following function to include your .cel script lines into the .celx script body :

Code: Select all

function CEL(source)
   local script = celestia:createcelscript(source)
   while script:tick() do
      wait(0)
   end
end

CEL([[
{

# Paste here your .cel script lines

}
]])

Indeed that's useful for testing! In particular travelling to galaxies ...is instantaneous. You are about to discover the charm of CELX scripting

Fridger,

It's great to see you're interested in scripts, and even more, that you're promoting scripts.
Things are really changing...

[Cham]

This is off topic now, so I'll email you, Vincent.

[t00fri]

Indeed that's useful for testing! In particular travelling to galaxies ...is instantaneous. You are about to discover the charm of CELX scripting

Fridger,

It's great to see you're interested in scripts, and even more, that you're promoting scripts.
Things are really changing...

Vincent,

actually, I am really not interested in Celestia scripting, except fancier constructs, like what Hank is exploring at present.

But since I am actually a wizzard as to the Maple scripting language (for my everydays professional Math), it turns out that this way, I happen to know some LUA as well: Lua and Maple basic syntax is virtually 1<-> 1.

Funnily enough, there is neither from the LUA creators nor from the Maple team any respective reference...

Bye Fridger

[buggs_moran]

Just an FYI on my system using the cloud shadows. As you can see, all I get are longitudinal stripes. They move in a polar motion with equatorial cloud motion (ie transversely). At times I do see what would be considered shadows, but they are not cast by the clouds directly above the shadows. I am using Fridger's cloud dds file. My specs are below. I use an ATI 9600 with the latest drivers (9/20) and a windows build from yesterday (9/23).

[fsgregs]

Fridger:

In answer to your question, I have not yet tried 1.5.0 on my system, since I do not know how to compile, and the Windows exe file seems to be incomplete. I was commenting on the appearance of cloud shadows only based on the screenshots that Chris included in the posting above.



Frank