Celestia 1.5.0 Bugs

[Guckytos]

Okay,

I open a bug thread for 1.5.0. It's just out and I have already something to report. Arrghh

Okay, I am not using miy config from signature, I am running 1.5.0 on my old machine:

Windows 98 SE (german)
256 MB RAM
40 GB Harddrive
Ati 8500LE 64MB graphics

The problem is that I have absolutely NO keyboard control, except ESC.
That means I can't use any keyboard shortcut; no goto, no toggling of clouds and no Enter/Object/Enter-method.
Not even "H" for home.

Anyone else having something similar? Or an idea where the trouble lies?

A puzzled Guckytos

[Adirondack]

Christian,

I can't confirm that. I'm on XP- and Vista-machines though.

Adirondack

[DaveMc]

It's been way too long since I posted here, just busy doing other things I guess. Just downloaded 1.5.0 final and have the same problem as Guckytos. The only keyboard commands that work are zoom with "Home" and "End" and the arrow orientation keys, everything else is dead.

I'm also using an older OS, Win ME, and older graphics card per specs below. When I get a chance I will load 1.5.0 at work on a more updated PC but I suspect this is an OS issue.

Dave

----------------

Gateway 1700cx
1.7GHz P4
1280 MB RAM
ATI Radoen VE 7000 Video Card, 64 MB RAM
WIN ME
Celestia 1.5.0

[chris]

It's been way too long since I posted here, just busy doing other things I guess. Just downloaded 1.5.0 final and have the same problem as Guckytos. The only keyboard commands that work are zoom with "Home" and "End" and the arrow orientation keys, everything else is dead.

I'm also using an older OS, Win ME, and older graphics card per specs below. When I get a chance I will load 1.5.0 at work on a more updated PC but I suspect this is an OS issue.

Dave

This does sound like an OS issue. My suspicion is that there's some trouble with the new support for entering Unicode characters in Celestia 1.5.0: since Win98/ME don't have proper Unicode support, there may be some compatibility issue.

--Chris

[Guckytos]

It's been way too long since I posted here, just busy doing other things I guess. Just downloaded 1.5.0 final and have the same problem as Guckytos. The only keyboard commands that work are zoom with "Home" and "End" and the arrow orientation keys, everything else is dead.

I'm also using an older OS, Win ME, and older graphics card per specs below. When I get a chance I will load 1.5.0 at work on a more updated PC but I suspect this is an OS issue.

Dave

This does sound like an OS issue. My suspicion is that there's some trouble with the new support for entering Unicode characters in Celestia 1.5.0: since Win98/ME don't have proper Unicode support, there may be some compatibility issue.

--Chris

I was afraid that it would be something like that. Darn.

Okay, uninstall 1.5.0 from the old machine, switch back to 1.4.1 on that one and only use the new pc for Celestia 1.5.0 upwards.

To bad.

Regards,

Guckytos

[bdm]

In the OpenGL 2.0 render path, I have noticed two anomalies:

1. Eclipses appear to have substantially different durations. For example, one could watch Io as it is eclipsed by Jupiter, and switch between the render paths. On OPenGL 2.0, Io is completely within Jupiter's shadow while the other render paths show Io as still being in sunlight.

2. On OpenGL 2.0, the sky appears substantially darker than the other render paths.

Video card: NVidia Geforce 6200
O/S: Windows XP

[chrisr]

I've found a rather strange bug. But what makes it wierd is that it's appeared so suddenly. It won't even go away when i restart the program. Apparently, the earth won't rotate. I have no idea how this could have happened, so I'm just assuming it's a bug.


update...actually, none of the planets seem to be rotating...

HELP

[selden]

Check to make sure simulation time is advancing. It's shown in the upper right corner. Type a \ if it's "stopped" and/or a <space> if it's "paused".

[Christophe]

This does sound like an OS issue. My suspicion is that there's some trouble with the new support for entering Unicode characters in Celestia 1.5.0: since Win98/ME don't have proper Unicode support, there may be some compatibility issue.

I confirm, support for pre-Windows 2000 MS OSes was abandoned when Unicode support was introduced.

Windows 98 is a 10 year old MS-DOS based system with no support from its vendor since July 2006.

For old hardware there are better alternatives available at no charge.

[bdm]

If a system consists of a system barycenter with a pair of stars in a close orbit, and a planet is specified as orbiting the barycenter of the stellar system (rather than orbiting a star), the temperature of the planet is always 0 K.

On the test planet, I specified an albedo of 0.25.

(And yes, I have been playing around a bit with Delta Trianguli.)

[chris]

If a system consists of a system barycenter with a pair of stars in a close orbit, and a planet is specified as orbiting the barycenter of the stellar system (rather than orbiting a star), the temperature of the planet is always 0 K.

On the test planet, I specified an albedo of 0.25.

(And yes, I have been playing around a bit with Delta Trianguli.)

That's a known bug with the calculation of temperature. After making some modifications to the Star class, it should be simple to fix. I actually want to remove Temperature from the list of fields shown in the text display. It confuses a lot of people because there's no explanation that it's the equilibrium temperature. It's also of interest rather infrequently: 99% of the time it's just visual clutter. I want to move it to a separate 'Object Info' panel rather than showing it in the 3D window.

--Chris

[sch]

Date show not correct in russian

My system - Linux Debian 4.0
Environment variable: LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R

Celestia 1.5.0 compiling with:
./configure --with-gtk --with-lua

Celestia runs normally
(after adding russian fonts from
http://celestia.teyssier.org/i18n/)
but show "?" signs instead of month and day of week

Debugging show that problem in
src/celestia/celestiacore.cpp:3338

const char* dateStr = d.toCStr(dateFormat);

fills date string in local encoding (koi8-r in my system)
but Celestia need this string in utf-8 always for output.
After dateStr recive date string in local encoding,
converting to utf-8 needed.

I dont know what correct this problem.
Please, correct this.

[Christophe]

Debugging show that problem in
src/celestia/celestiacore.cpp:3338

const char* dateStr = d.toCStr(dateFormat);

fills date string in local encoding (koi8-r in my system)
but Celestia need this string in utf-8 always for output.
After dateStr recive date string in local encoding,
converting to utf-8 needed.

I dont know what correct this problem.
Please, correct this.

Thanks for the detailed bug report. You're right, Celestia incorrectly assumes that the current locale is always in UTF-8.

Until this is fixed you can work around this by switching to a UTF-8 locale before launching Celestia.

You can check if a UTF-8 locale is available with:

Code: Select all

$ locale -a

If ru_RU.utf8 is not listed you can install it by running:

Code: Select all

$ dpkg-reconfigure locales

Then you can start Celestia with:

Code: Select all

$ LC_ALL=ru_RU.utf8 celestia

[bdm]

If you go to the surface (Ctrl-G) of a planet with rings, sometimes there are drawing artifacts such as black polygons. It doesn't happen to every planet with rings.

It is most evident when landing on Uranus in this way (See below). It also happens to Saturn sometimes (after going to the surface, pan the camera down to see it) but not Neptune.

Screenshot:

cel bookmark: Uranus Surface
cel bookmark: Saturn surface

If you disable the rings by commenting them out, the problem goes away.

Platform: Windows

[BobHegwood]

If you go to the surface (Ctrl-G) of a planet with rings, sometimes there are drawing artifacts such as black polygons. It doesn't happen to every planet with rings.

I have noticed various artifacts like you describe here, but they
don't seem to be consistent.

If I go to Uranus, I can avoid these problems simply by switching to
the plain "Multi-texture" mode. CTRL-V to see which mode renders
this planet in a pleasing manner on your system. Does not occur on
Saturn (on my machine) so I simply switch back to "OpenGL" mode.

This is just what I do to get around these problems.
Seems to me that almost all of these render problems are
dependent upon what your particular machine has done with its
particular development of Open GL. What works one one
machine simply has no affect on another machine. <shrug>

These problems between machines obviously put Chris between
a rock and a hard place. How one could ever get them all to
render correctly is way beyond MY understanding.

[bdm]

The behaviour of rings I reported above appears to depend on the ratio of planetary radius to outer radius of the rings. The greater the ratio between outer radius of the rings and planetary radius, the larger the black area.

This does not guarantee that a black area will actually be present, only that its size can be made to vary predictably if it is present.

[bdm]

After starting up Celestia, pressing ENTER (to enter a name) and then pressing ESCAPE (to cancel it) causes Celestia to stop following the Earth.

(Windows XP)

[chris]

After starting up Celestia, pressing ENTER (to enter a name) and then pressing ESCAPE (to cancel it) causes Celestia to stop following the Earth.

(Windows XP)

This behavior is easy to change, but it's not clear to me that the way it works now is actually undesirable. How do others feel about this? Should the function of ESC be changed so that when the ENTER-selection box is activated, pressing ESC dismisses the selection box and nothing else?

--Chris

[Chuft-Captain]

bdm,

Just use ENTER instead of ESC. (ENTER with an invalid selection will just leave the existing object selected).
eg. If you've already typed "Mars" and change your mind, just backspace to remove the "s" and type ENTER.
"Mar" returns no valid objects, so Earth remains selected.

ESC is also used to cancel scripts, and I would hate to lose that ability as a result of changes to the ESC functionality.

CC

[gcne67]

Hi

I'm trying the CEL urls at

http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/celurls/

and all that happens with is Celestia is started or activated and a blank, black screen displayed or some "random star field", although the display says that the planet etc is selected but I'm always around 200AU away from what ever I'm supposed to be looking at. Goto and other commands seem to work irratically from then also. For example selecting another planet and the going to it fills the screen with it and moving away doesnt change the display -- full screen view of the planet from about 10km away!!

I tried V141ED and dont seem to have this problem -- I could run the education tours without any problems. Althought I had to resinstall 1.5 to re-associate CEL scripts and URLs with 1.5 as 1.4.1 had tken over the associations.

Any suggestions in case I'm doing something wrong?

Thanks
GC