Cumbersome installation process - packed version?

[Bodin]

Hi,
The installation process of Celestia is extremely cumbersome if one wants to have most of the add-ons.
I want highest resolution textures of Earth, the Moon, the Sun and Mars, as well as a bunch of nebulas, and the number of downloads, unpacks, reading of readme's, placing of files, etc just eats way, way too much of my time.

Is there any roadmap towards self installation or even hot installation functionality of these things?
Google Earth, for example, loads everything on demand of course, and can cache on the HD. Cygwin, for example, has a download facility that makes it easy to maintain the software.

The way it currently works, it isn't enough to be a space enthusiast, one must also be a quite a computer geek to run Celestia.

Simplest way to do this would be if someone could put together a highend package with all the bells and whistles installed, and then put this on a bittorrent server. It would be a 10-15 Gb file I suppose, but this would offload the other servers and also make Celestia much more available.

[Guckytos]

You are welcome to create such a package!

[t00fri]

Celestia comes with a base set of textures. The installation of this official distribution is trivial! Any add-ons are not the responsability of the Celestia development team and in fact are often faulty or bad quality! Add-ons are entirely produced by users like yourself!!

Really hires textures that insiders use are far larger than what you anticipated. My 64k x 32k texture tile set for Earth is ~8GB unpacked /for each type/ of texture needed: RGB base, specular, normalmap, etc

Your request is not feasible for many reasons. We had plenty of discussions about this in the past. -> search engine

Celestia is not a program for a particular purpose but rather a general, scientific quality /framework/. This implies that what may be a nice texture for your standards, may be considered inadequate by others.

Anyhow you are cordially invited to produce a great collection of add-ons and share it with the Celestia community. That's how we operate here. Just for your information, Celestia has way above 5 million downloads meanwhile, so it can't be all that painful to use Celestia

Bye Fridger

[rthorvald]

Anyhow you are cordially invited to produce a great collection of add-ons and share it with the Celestia community.

If someone took the job, it would be very interesting. But there are great challenges...

For one, if you want to create an "official" Celestia package, you need to find textures that are both scientifically sound (harder than you think, as most hi-res textures available are not), AND they must be open-source, or at least have an acceptable Creative Commons licence attached to them.

Second, the textures selected also need to be of technically professional quality, so as to reflect the quality of the software.

The only easy thing about it is the storage and bandwidth, which you will get for free on the Motherlode. The rest is a _huge_ task. Not impossible perhaps, but more work than is practical to take on alone. Some members here might be interested in pitching in, though.

- rthorvald

[John Van Vliet]

seeing as the .exe installer is 14 meg and my install folder is 7.5 GIG in size
? would you want to download a 7+ Gig. installer