Celestia Forums

Okay... I feel the need to rant some, and then beg for help...

There's a lot of people out there in the world that do not know much about computers. There are also a few people out there that aren't nearly intelligent enough to use some of the more advanced materials that one can use with Celestia.

Items such as nmtools and F-TexTools seem to be really neat, but either there is something wrong with my computer, or they seem to require quite a bit of knowledge about computers to use.

I have a 16,384 pixel by 32768 pixel map that I would like to convert into nice little 512 x 512 .jpg tiles for a virtual texture map. My computer completely refuses to open the file in any program that will allow me to crop it into the required sizes. So the realisation hit me,

My thoughts wrote:You need to download Fridger's F-TexTools... I think that those are designed to make VT tiles from a large image file

So I went to CelestialMatters (why do we have two forums? isn't that less convenient?) and found the F-TexTools fairly easily enough, and downloaded it.

None of the programs work for me =(. On each of them, I get an error saying "This application has failed to start because MSVCP71.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem." Well I re-downloaded and re-installed it and it did the same thing. How do I fix this issue? And even then, how do I use it? The readme is far from straightforward as far as absent-minded, computer illiterate fools such as I are concerned.

Are nmtools required for F-TexTools to work?

Which FTex-tools did you download? There was an issue with environment variables not being initialized correctly but I thought that was fixed. Also which Windows version are you using? EDIT I see you use XP Home Edition.
As for how to use them assuming you get them to work, I wrote a few scripts that are at my web site on the specmap page that builds a BMNG VT with a normalmap. It sounds like you are doing something else but they could give you some insight. Ftex-tools builds a VT. NMTools builds a normalmap. So you don't need both unless you are building both.
cartrite

there is also a program ( runs on windows ) that will handle a 32k map "nip2 " http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS
two programs need to be installed , The vips library and nip2 ( the GUI).
and if you have MinGW ( http://www.mingw.org/ ) a Linux environment for windows . Or CygWin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ )
there is a script i have ( a port of Dr. Fridger Schrempp's virtualtexture ) to run using the vips lib ( nip2) .To cut a map into 512x512.png tiles .
-------------------
the fx-tools require the input image to be in .bin ( raw format ) image magick can do it but a 32k map will take about 1 to 5 hours , depending on your system.
and the nmtools REQUIRE the input image to be a 16bit grayscale singed image in .raw/.bin format. I do have a hack that allows a unsinged image as input ( Linux only )
for more help see Celestial Matters
Texture Tools
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewf ... 270fd1ef56
and for nmtools
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewf ... 270fd1ef56

john Van Vliet wrote:there is also a program ( runs on windows ) that will handle a 32k map "nip2 " http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS
two programs need to be installed , The vips library and nip2 ( the GUI).
and if you have MinGW ( http://www.mingw.org/ ) a Linux environment for windows . Or CygWin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ )
there is a script i have ( a port of Dr. Fridger Schrempp's virtualtexture ) to run using the vips lib ( nip2) .To cut a map into 512x512.png tiles .
-------------------
the fx-tools require the input image to be in .bin ( raw format ) image magick can do it but a 32k map will take about 1 to 5 hours , depending on your system.
and the nmtools REQUIRE the input image to be a 16bit grayscale singed image in .raw/.bin format. I do have a hack that allows a unsinged image as input ( Linux only )
for more help see Celestial Matters
Texture Tools
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewf ... 270fd1ef56
and for nmtools
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewf ... 270fd1ef56

John,

it is NOT correct that my F-TexTools require the input to be in bin format. From the beginning I have added a conversion tool, called png2bin that accepts PNG input images and just needs to be included in the "pipeline".

Also, my F-Tex tool that cuts an image into tiles does MUCH more than just that (same for the corresponding nmtool!): it cleverly varies the width of the resulting tiles depending on the latitude. This avoids the excessive overlap of tiles near the poles without sacrificing quality/resolution. For normalmaps there are even additional strong optimizations. Anyway these measures save quite a bit of card memory and harddisk space and thus provide SPEED for big textures.

Moreover, the speed of my tools for big files has NO competition as far as I can tell. And that by a LARGE margin .

Fridger

Hungry4info wrote:Okay... I feel the need to rant some,
...
So I went to CelestialMatters (why do we have two forums? isn't that less convenient?)

CelestialMatters is NOT merely an outpost of shatters net. CM has a much wider definition of subjects than this forum. In addition, there Runar, ElChristou and myself have "the saying". That makes quite some difference at times

Moreover, we have almost unlimited storage on the ibiblio server. It was granted to us (free of charge), after formally applying at the Ibiblio Consortium (http://www.ibiblio.org/) with our CM project along with a detailed concept layout... ! Incidentally, it's the same server that also hosts the Motherlode...

Last not least, at CM you would have found answers and tutorials about virtually ALL questions you might have had about my F-TexTools or the nmtools, which --of course-- have a much wider range of application than just Celestia! Many many people with all sorts of OS's on their computers and strongly varying knowledge about computers succeeded using my tools.

You seem to be kind of proud about not knowing much in this field ...

Fridger

PS: How about this latest CM tutorial by our "Brain-Dead" expert Bob Hegwood?
Fridger's Texture Tools for the Brain-Dead
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=217

As far as I've been able to tell, MSVCP71.dll is distributed in a fairly idiotic way. It is supposed to be distributed by the developers of the application which relies on it. However, so many applications rely on it that many developers don't notice that they have to include the file.

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