Celestia 1.5.0 prerelease 4

[selden]

Gentle folk,

Please don't turn this into a Mac vs Windows discussion. All of the platforms that Celestia runs on have their advantages and disadvantages.

(While strictly speaking, MacOS is not currently subject to viral file infections, it is victimized by other types of malware. See http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/secu ... virus.html To most people, however, the distinction between a virus and a worm is irrelevant.)

[Don. Edwards]

Bob,

Service pack 1 for Vista has not been released yet. Its still in beta and will not be out until spring. If you somehow have service pack 1 on your system, that could be were some of your troubles might be. It just isn't ready yet. Service pack 3 for XP is the next one in line for release.

Also be aware that if you totally remove Vista from your computer and you did not get a certificate for and or an XP install CD with your machine, you be voiding your systems warranty. What ever company made your machine will flat out not talk to you and you will have allot of trouble in the end. I will give you a more insightful way to do things when I PM you later.

Don. Edwards

[Reiko]

YAY! for pre 4!

[t00fri]

I was about to suggest Bob to get a Mac too. OS X (Tiger) is so clean, so stable, so perfect, it's really unbelievable what Apple have done here.

And it's literally virus free !

OS X is the full Unix power under the hood.

The only major problems with Macs are their video card drivers, which may sucks at times.

Martin,

what typical CPU performance are you praising here? What I have seen on the Apple front so far did mainly LOOK NICE, but the hard core performance was more than mediocre. This is a very subjective impression and may well be different in general, of course.

My former PhD student bought a MAC powerbook 1-1.5 years ago that has only ~1.25 GHz clock frequency! At that time equivalently slow Intel PC's were NOT sold anymore. I would not know what to do with such a machine (and he does neither, meanwhile ). Also one of DW's MAC notebooks was pretty much of the same category. With the F-TexTools, it performed about a factor 6-8 slower than my DELL Core 2 Duo 2.o GHz notebook or my 3.2 GHz/ 3GB ram P4 desktop, which is quite a few years old, meanwhile.

Beauty is OK, but I at least need computers not just for email etc. but for HARD number crunching and VERY complex algebraic manipulations.

So I havn't heard much in this regard from the defenders of MAC power so far.

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

Martin,

what typical CPU performance are you praising here? What I have seen on the Apple front so far did mainly LOOK NICE, but the hard core performance was more than mediocre. This is a very subjective impression and may well be different in general, of course.

My former PhD student bought a MAC powerbook 1-1.5 years ago that has only ~1.25 GHz clock frequency! At that time equivalently slow Intel PC's were NOT sold anymore. I would not know what to do with such a machine (and he does neither, meanwhile ). Also one of DW's MAC notebooks was pretty much of the same category. With the F-TexTools, it performed about a factor 6-8 slower than my DELL Core 2 Duo 2.o GHz notebook or my 3.2 GHz/ 3GB ram P4 desktop, which is quite a few years old, meanwhile.

Beauty is OK, but I at least need computers not just for email etc. but for HARD number crunching and VERY complex algebraic manipulations.

So I havn't heard much in this regard from the defenders of MAC power so far.

Bye Fridger

Fridger, I suppose one should do some benchmark with similar configs but it's true actually almost all Mac are not THAT powerful and have as target people who don't really need performances but confort.
Now I would be curious to test your tools on one of those 2x quad core intel Xeon at 3Ghz with 16GB of ram and a Quadro FX 4500... of course the bill is hard to swallow...

[dirkpitt]

Just a quick clarification of Fridger's F-TexTools results:
My 1.33GHz mac powerbook performed quite similarly to a 1.6GHz Celeron (P3 I think). For example, one of the tests which took 40 minutes on my machine would also take almost 40 mins on the Celeron. This doesn't explain why a 3.2GHz which is 2~2.4x clock speed is nearly 6~8x faster (maybe there is a 3~4x bandwidth increase in the newer chips?), but seeing as the Celeron 1.6GHz was doing similarly poorly it disproves the "macs are slower" theory..

[t00fri]

Just a quick clarification of Fridger's F-TexTools results:
My 1.33GHz mac powerbook performed quite similarly to a 1.6GHz Celeron (P3 I think). For example, one of the tests which took 40 minutes on my machine would also take almost 40 mins on the Celeron. This doesn't explain why a 3.2GHz which is 2~2.4x clock speed is nearly 6~8x faster (maybe there is a 3~4x bandwidth increase in the newer chips?), but seeing as the Celeron 1.6GHz was doing similarly poorly it disproves the "macs are slower" theory..

DW,

but are such Celeron's still sold?? I still have a 6 YEAR OLD "museum" DELL C600 Latitude notebook that has a 1.1 GHz P3 CPU. It's really not possible to do serious calculations with the latest Maple or Mathematica versions or texture work with this machine, as we are used to do these days.

The latest Maple11 version takes exactly 5 minutes before I can start working in the (Java) GUI! My former PhD student also has given up doing serious Maple calculations on his MAC 1.25 GHz. Whatever you compare such machines with, they are not suitable for physicists that I can say for sure

I have had all our P3 machines in my department replaced about 2-3 years ago! Vista would just collapse on such machines

Bye Fridger

[Johaen]

Just a quick clarification of Fridger's F-TexTools results:
My 1.33GHz mac powerbook performed quite similarly to a 1.6GHz Celeron (P3 I think). For example, one of the tests which took 40 minutes on my machine would also take almost 40 mins on the Celeron. This doesn't explain why a 3.2GHz which is 2~2.4x clock speed is nearly 6~8x faster (maybe there is a 3~4x bandwidth increase in the newer chips?), but seeing as the Celeron 1.6GHz was doing similarly poorly it disproves the "macs are slower" theory..

Clock speed isn't everything. There's improved calculating, increased cache, and a bunch of other stuff that I don't understand. That's why my 2.2 GHz AMD processor is quite a bit faster than say, a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4. It's actually rated at 6.6 GHz according to System Requirements Lab.

[dirkpitt]

but are such Celeron's still sold??

Such Celeron's are indeed no longer sold. It doesn't mean some unfortunate chaps aren't still forced to use them at work.

My former PhD student also has given up doing serious Maple calculations on his MAC 1.25 GHz.

My Mac is over 3 years old, caught fire once (!), and it's still running like a champ. Or should I say, it's still crawling along.. lol

[Cham]

I was using an old Mac IIci for 11 YEARS, before I changed it few years ago. And I was running Mathematica on it, without a glitch ! How's about that !? A friend of mine used his Mac LC for 15 YEARS, before he changed it to a new iMac recently. So Mac are pretty rough machines !

[BlindedByTheLight]

For anyone interested, I've got a 1.5pre4 Mac OS X version available at...


stevenbinder.net

Enjoy

[t00fri]

I was using an old Mac IIci for 11 YEARS, before I changed it few years ago. And I was running Mathematica on it, without a glitch ! How's about that !? A friend of mine used his Mac LC for 15 YEARS, before he changed it to a new iMac recently. So Mac are pretty rough machines !

Well, Mathematica and Mathematica is NOT the same .

Our typical workfiles are 30-50 pages (without output, of course ), involve complicated multiple integrations, series expansions in several variables, eigenvalue problems with huge matrices, and other such time consuming stuff. They run /hours/ on modern core 2 duo machines requiring 3-4 GB's of memory. It's like with application software, the complexity of theoretical research tasks tends to grow with the power of the available computers.

Also you were lucky: Unlike the Maple GUI, the GUI of Mathematica is still not in Java and thus starts off VERY fast. In exchange it is also quite primitive compared to the one in Maple.

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

For anyone interested, I've got a 1.5pre4 Mac OS X version available at...


stevenbinder.net

Enjoy

Tx Steven!

[ElChristou]

Our typical workfiles are 30-50 pages (without output, of course ), involve complicated multiple integrations, series expansions in several variables, eigenvalue problems with huge matrices, and other such time consuming stuff...

I would love to see such document! That gives me the idea to do some kind of abstract painting full of such complex math! That would be crazy to have above the sofa the last equations in the field!!

[fsgregs]

Hi guys:

Thanks for 1.5.0pre4's release.

If this is not the proper thread to report 1.5.0pre4 bugs, please move this to the right place.

I have been waiting for 1.5.0pre4 to come out so that a major bug in atmospheric lighting would be fixed. Alas ... it is still there. In broad daylight, if I look up into the sky, I can see most of the planets glowing brightly, in a sky that looks almost black. I've tested it in OpenGL 2.0.

I have a new LCD Samsung 22 inch monitor with the latest Nvidia drivers on my GeForce 7600 GT video card, so I don't think it is a hardware or driver problem.

Here are some screenshots:



Default Earth as seen from space


Ground level - notice altitude is next to surface. Clouds are off



Image 2 looking straight up. Three planets are visible as well as the sun. It is near noon in the photo.



Image 3 with planet labels turned on. Notice that in daylight, we can see Mercury and Saturn, as well as Venus.



Image 2 and 3 with FOV zoomed out so you can also see the ground. Notice it is clearly midday, not near dusk or dawn.

Obviously, our sky does not look blue-black when you look up at noon, nor can we see the planets like this.



Please fix soon. I cannot use 1.5.0pre4 in my educational work with this bug in it. I am anxious to do so, because I really want to incorporate Vincent's great LUA tools.

I'll keep testing and let you know what else I find.

Thanks

Frank

[phoenix]

I wouldn't call this a bug but a lack of realism.

There is an experimental HDR-version of celestia beeing coded in the dev-section which at least solves one of your problems.
lets hope it makes it into the official celestia sometimes

changing the color of the sky on daylight can be adjusted by changing earth atmosphere parameters in solarsys.scc

[hank]

If this is not the proper thread to report 1.5.0pre4 bugs, please move this to the right place.

I have been waiting for 1.5.0pre4 to come out so that a major bug in atmospheric lighting would be fixed. Alas ... it is still there. In broad daylight, if I look up into the sky, I can see most of the planets glowing brightly, in a sky that looks almost black. I've tested it in OpenGL 2.0.
...
Please fix soon. I cannot use 1.5.0pre4 in my educational work with this bug in it.

"Fix too dark sky at zenith" is on the list of things to be done for Celestia 1.5.0 final.

- Hank

[rthorvald]

Hey, thank you for the work, guys!
I have been too busy to test it until today; looks beautiful so far...

- rthorvald

[danielj]

When you get too near the surface,the texture is ripped off:
http://img215.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... gpryg7.jpg
http://img219.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... igpoq8.jpg

It appears that the model is NOT correctly placed on the surface.The same happened on Mars.The black holes on the atmosphere are still there,too...
Maybe it is a depth sorting problem(a guess...)

[bdm]

When you get too near the surface,the texture is ripped off:
http://img215.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... gpryg7.jpg
http://img219.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... igpoq8.jpg

It appears that the model is NOT correctly placed on the surface.The same happened on Mars.The black holes on the atmosphere are still there,too...
Maybe it is a depth sorting problem(a guess...)

According to your screenshots, the FPS also seems to plummet when this happens.