Celestia Forums

Now and then I am having trouble figuring out what textures are
used by Celestia. Can anyone tell me what happens when more then one
(earth) texture is available in the hires directory.
The solarsys file allows reading all types of bitmaps for for instance
earth , indicated by the "*" sign.

Also I would like to know what specular texture is used when
there is a specular texture placed in the hires dir (the solarsys file tells to read this one) but the given planet also contains a alpha-channel
where the specular texture can be read from.


Ren?©

The order of filetypes is ctx, png, jpg, dds

Right now if both types of specular textures are specified, it seems they both are loaded and strange things happen. Hopefully that bug will be resolved in the not too distant future.

The order of filetypes is ctx, png, jpg, dds

Selden, I presume that if a CTX file is found , the rest is ignored ??

Concerning the specular textures: I really love one Earth texture I found, except for its data in the specular data in the alpha-channel,
is there a way to disable Celestia reading/using this texture
and use the texture given by the solarsys.ssc file ??

Removing the alpha-channel would be an option,
except that the file is a DDS type, and there are little programs able
to remove/edit this channel

Ren?©

When Celestia does a wildcard filetype search, only the first type found is used: if there's a CTX virtual texture, an all-in-one PNG file will be ignored. Note that this very specialized case is the only use Celestia makes of wildcards. You can't use an asterisk any other way.

Unfortunately, Celestia does not currently do what you want. It does seem to me to be a reasonable feature request though: if SpecularMap is specified, ignore the Alpha channel.

You might try contacting the author of the Addon to see if you can get a copy without the Alpha channel.

Alternatively, there are utilities that can translate DDS into other formats. Irfanview can do it, for example.

selden wrote:The order of filetypes is ctx, png, jpg, dds

Right now if both types of specular textures are specified, it seems they both are loaded and strange things happen. Hopefully that bug will be resolved in the not too distant future.

This should be easy to fix. I should have it taken care of in the next 1.5.0 prerelease.

--Chris