I am glad that it worked
Now you know what follows:
level 1:
1 ) inside of your celestia/textures/hires/earth folder, create a new folder called level1 (without spaces)
2 ) with the GIMP, create 8 images 512x512 in rgb: one orange, the other green, etc. Do not use blue/red/white/black because they could mask undesired effects. Save them as
tx_0_0.jpg
tx_0_1.jpg
tx_0_2.jpg
tx_0_3.jpg
tx_1_0.jpg
tx_1_1.jpg
tx_1_2.jpg
tx_1_3.jpg
inside the level1 folder.
3 ) run celestia. Go to earth, orbit it, etc.
You should see the planet painted blue/red. Now get closer (slowly, I recommend 7-9 short beats to the HOME key) at some point, you should see earth completely covered with a tiled pattern of the colors you used. Now there should be 8 of them.
Pay attention to the delays: some of them will be due to disk transfer (the textures are been loaded from disk) and some others (the shorter, silent ones) to data being transferred from main RAM to the video card RAM through the AGP/PCI port)
You can try to optimize your VT increasing/decreasing the size of your tiles in order to minimize these delays.
If this works OK (I mean, you can see the 8-colored tile pattern, and move the planet on screen with an acceptable smoothness) you should search for a real 512*512 tile size VT.
If you are on a dialup, I recommend downloading level1, 2 and 3. You can download the rest of the levels later (or better and quicker, make your own real VT)
Replace the earth folder with them (if the VT does not provide a .ctx you can use your own, but remember that the new folder name must match the one in your earth.ctx)
If you cannot find a 512*512 tile size VT, you can try downloading a 1024*1024 tile size one. If it works too slowly, you can downsample each 1024*1024 tile to 512*512 (a very boring task in GIMP, because it must be made manually)
Hope this works
