Earth Centrals Final Update is Done!

[Don. Edwards]

At 2:00AM PST what will be the final version of Earth Central went online. After weeks of fighting with html code and just plain not happy with what I was getting I have decided to dump most of the site. So what you will see is only a fraction of what was planned and made. The textures had been finished for several months now and I just couldn't see putting off there release any longer. I say this will be the final revision of the site because I simply have no intention of working on it any longer. If I make any new Earth textures they will be released through the Forum or if I can find someone to take over managing the site as well as the other Hub sites then there might be updated downloads. I would much rather put my time into texture creation instead of trying to code WebPages and constantly updating them. I have no problem admitting that I bit off way more than I could chew when it came to the sites update this time. I will not be making that mistake again.

Now the textures that are ready for download are the new 16k Seasonal textures that I have teased everyone with for months. There are of course smaller versions of the textures but I have not made any 2k versions. If you want a 2k version than you can easily resize the 4k PNG to your liking. I also kept the Realistic Earth and Pale Blue Dot textures from the old site. I have added the new Northern Summer cloudmap and a not quite completed Northern Winter cloudmap. Both are at the 8k level. If there is a demand for the matching shadow textures I will make them available as well. Also not so cleverly hidden is a link to my TDAT texture, that is (The Day After Tomorrow) texture that I have shown from time to time.

I have finished my first VT, it is a 16k version of the Northern Summer cloudmap. I have it cut into 2k PNG tiles and it does look quite nice. But I need for someone to possibly take it further and make the tiles smaller and to convert them to DDS so if anyone is ready for the job just ask.

Now there is one final note. I am not going to allow any of the new textures to be mirrored anywhere else for the time being. I just have too many textures out there all over the place and it is getting a difficult to keep track of what is what anymore. So the only downloading will be from Earth Central at this time. If I find that the downloads are slowing the forum and the Celestia home page down I will disable the downloads for a few days until things get under control. Also if I find that any of my new textures are being mirrored elsewhere I will take action to stop the mirroring. These textures are under copyright and as the author it is my prerogative to control there release. If I see any evidence of noncompliance with my wishes than Earth Central and the other Hub sites will go down and all my textures will go with them. I am deadly serious about this.
If anyone has any questions as to why I made this choice I will be more than willing to explain it. As for converting the texture to another format for another program I still have no problem with that as long as the person asks first and tell me what it?€™s for and that they do not plan on distributing the texture after conversion. Yes this seems like a big crack down but I do have some issues and I would like then cleared out of the way before I let the new textures get mirrored anywhere.

Well that should sum things up for now. As always any comments and questions are always welcome.

So go check out the all new Earth Central
http://www.celestiaproject.net/~impulse/Earth_ ... ntral.html

Don. Edwards

[mmarable]

I'm getting a "file not found" error when I click the enter button.

[Dollan]

Where does this place Mars Central, your HD project, and all of that? Will we be seeing those soon, or are you taking a break now that Earth Central is finished?

...John...

[Dollan]

Oop, I just noticed that your links to the cloud maps are no longer present. Is this by design, or error?

At any rate, the page itself is exciting and a wonderful achievment. Thanks for sharing!

...John...

[Don. Edwards]

Oops,
I thought I checked everything. The links to the clouds will be fixed tonight.
Sorry about that.

Work on HD 28185 continues now that I am done with Earth Central. I still will not give a time table but it is sooner than before.

Don. Edwards

[Jeam Tag]

At 2:00AM PST what will be the final version of Earth Central went online. [...]Don. Edwards

Nice news, Don, i hope to make an useful update of these items on my French catalog very soon: for months i do not exactly knows what are the textures (and where they are) you want to see quoted on line: you can see on my old pages (ie: 'TexturesHautes R?©solutions/Terre') that i don't know what to do with numberous archives from your great work! sorry...)
So, I'll update soon these new colation references, BTW after a little verification, it seems to me neither the 'Northern/autumn 4k.dds' link, nor all the cloudmap links are working. All the other items are ok. (i have tested each of them to discover their .zip sizes (I always try to note the addon sizes in my pages, it seems important to me that somebody who want to dwl an addon knows it size...)
If it can help.
Jeam
PS: what about your Aurora tex: what is the adress i can quoted now for those who want to dwl it? Is it a future new release for your Eatrth Central?

[Jeam Tag]

Oops,
I thought I checked everything. The links to the clouds will be fixed tonight.
Sorry about that.

Oops, I don't have received your answer when i wrote my little comment, sorry... 'Course I'll wait your fix to complete my notes... Jeam.

[Don. Edwards]

Well I guess that is what happens when you update a site at 2 in the morning.
All the cloud links are now hot and it looks like the Northern Autumn 4k DDS was not a completed upload for some reason. That is being re-uploaded as I type this.
I do know that there are a few textures I have made in the past that have missing. My old Pluto texture is an example. I have the Night side Lights and Aurora texture still. I will throw it back into the new download directory and put a link here. I also have to upload the Northern Winter Specmaps. I completely forgot about them. I personally don't use them because they are just to darn bright and make the clouds look bad. But I will upload them as well and put a hyperlink to them. I will put the links in the under the textures section of the forum as that will of course be the proper place for them.

I also plan on posting some new pictures of the HD 28185 add-on and show its progress. I came across some new info about the system on the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia website and have adjusted my textures to fit with what they are proposing the system may be like. I have to move a few of the moons around because of a few things I didn't take into account. But things are starting to finally wrap-up on the add-on.

I think that takes care of things at this point. Any other problems found with the textures or the links please let me know.

Don. Edwards

[Dollan]

Just out of curiosity, what ever happened with your Earth Mark I and Orpheus textures? Were those for a profesisonal project only and not for public consumption (aside from those mouth-watering images)?

...John...

[Don. Edwards]

Hey Dollan,
They were originally made for Frank for his Celestia educational activities with NASA. Well we all that the NASA part went into the toilet. I was still going to give them to Frank when I had a hard drive crash and burn on me. It happened to be the drive the only copies of the textures were on. Or so I thought. After allot of shuffling of files and doing back-ups so this wouldn't happen again, yah right, I happen to come across an unnamed folder that had a duplicate set of Orpheus textures and a few of my earliest concepts for Earth Mark I. I am still supposed to get a copy of them to Frank but I just haven't got around to it. I guess I should give them to him. He did buy me a new video card when mine went out last year. He did it as payment for all the Mars textures I made for him for the Mars Terraforming project. I had several version of Orpheus in different colors and I am tempted to dump them onto the server for someone to use. I will have to go back and find the CDR that they are stored on and transfer them. As soon as I locate the disc and get them uploaded I will post the info in the forum.

Don. Edwards

[Dollan]

Sweet! Those textures are probably my favorites, and I can honestly say that Orpheus was what finally inspired me to go from a passive Celestia users to someone actively making his own add-ons. Someday, I hope, I'll be able to make some textures that compare with those!

...John...

[Jeam Tag]

Well I guess that is what happens when you update a site at 2 in the morning.

Thanks Don, seems all is loocking to work well, but... I've dwl some maps and it seems that 'New-Nortern-Summerclouds', 'NS-SA', 'NS-SW' and 'NW-SS' zips in the 4k. png colation look empty??? I can unzip and see (and reduce for my little computer) all the others..

I do know that there are a few textures I have made in the past that have missing. My old Pluto texture is an example.

I have somewhere your 'Pluto-concept4' (4,26Mb zipped, IIRC, this is right i must update these entry, too: tell us when it was avaible somewere soon!) Same things for your nice Aurora-night side lights...

I will put the links in the under the textures section of the forum as that will of course be the proper place for them.

Nice, thanks.

I also plan on posting some new pictures of the HD 28185 add-on and show its progress.

Nice again, love the screenshots you're ever provided.... Take care, Jeam

[ElChristou]

Hello, Don. Edwards

Very nice site. Tx.

A suggestion:

Why don't you put a link to 8K and 16k png files? ...dds is not a lossless format...

[Don. Edwards]

ElChristou,
The simple reason is download file size restraints. I could make the 8k PNG textures available but the 16k is just to big weighing in at 384MB per texture and that adds up to me uploading 2.3 Gigabytes of files. I can?€™t do that with only a 128kb DSL upload pipe. Besides you couldn't use it in Celestia anyway unless it was converted to a VT and I haven?€™t given anyone permission to do that as of yet. I have checked very carefully and the balance of quality between the PNG and the DDS files I make are fairly close. Sure there is going to be some loss of detail but is not really apparent until you start zooming very close to the texture. In all honesty the best you are going to get from any 16k texture is in orbit of the planet at about 1200 kilometers up. Any closer, even if it was a PNG file the texture starts to loose focus quickly. To go to the next level of detail will take a 32k or true 64k texture.
To be truthful with everyone there was a short time that I really was not going to release the Seasonal Earth 16k textures at all. I was considering taking the 16k textures to the next level and possibly charging or asking for a donation for them. But I changed my mind on this after I did some soul searching. But even with GPL licensing I can charge for the textures because I am totally altering them from there original form and I would be charging not really for the texture itself but for my time and labor I put into the textures changes.
I have been approached by a few professional groups that have used my textures for professional and state government projects and afterward they sent me images of what they did with them. So I know now my textures are up to the Professional level.
So to let everyone know right off the bat so to speak I am in the very early stages of making 32k Seasonal textures of the Earth but they will be strictly for licensed use and or private use after paying a nominal fee for them. I spent a great many hours on these 16k textures so everyone can enjoy them but there has to be a balance between time well spent using my creative skills and just me being silly and whiling away my time for nothing but a pat on the back. This is not to say that I will stop making textures for the Celestia community because I still plan to do that. But if I am going to spend over 300+ hours making a texture than I need to get something more out of it. Now multiply that time to each of the Seasonal Earth textures and you start to get my point. It is simple economics unfortunately. If I want to make the largest and best textures I can of the Earth I need first the time, second the hardware, my computer as it stands was a fairly powerful machine being a based on an Athlon XP 3200 with 1.5gigs of RAM. But making the seasonal textures brought my machine to its knees on more than one occasion. What this means is that when this happened I lost the work I was doing and had to go back to an earlier version of the texture and start again. So I am looking at a major upgrade to my working hardware. I have to pay for that and that takes money. So you can see why I had given the thought to charging for these textures a serious consideration. And with my work starting to catch the eye of professionals this really becomes an important point for me. The main reason I didn?€™t was I simply did not want the back-lash that would no doubt ensue from some members of the Celestia community.
Sorry this has become a major response but I felt it was important for everyone to know were I am coming from on this. I hope this answered your question and then some.

Don. Edwards

[ElChristou]

Tx.

As I'm not here for a long time I wasn't informed of your work/purpose.

Tx again.

bye