Celestia Forums

Hi there everyone. A couple of things:
First of all, congratulations for this astonishing program! It has been really blowing my mind.
Now for the tecnicall stuff. I?v downloaded from http://ennui.celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/bigmoon.zip, mars and earth. What are this *.dds files? Where do i put?em?

Chris:
I work in a planetarium (in Portugal), and we are conceiving a new session. Would it be allright to use animations from Celestia?Credits given to you guys, of course.

Keep on the good work.

mt_sabao wrote:Hi there everyone. A couple of things:
First of all, congratulations for this astonishing program! It has been really blowing my mind.
Now for the tecnicall stuff. I?v downloaded from http://ennui.celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/bigmoon.zip, mars and earth. What are this *.dds files? Where do i put?em?

You can put them in the textures/medres directory. You'll have to modify solarsys.ssc to get them to work--just use a text editor to change the Texture lines for the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Also, these will only work with a GeForce or Radeon graphics card. earth8k.dds is huge, and will probably only work on a graphics card with 64 megs of memory.

mt_sabao wrote:Chris:
I work in a planetarium (in Portugal), and we are conceiving a new session. Would it be allright to use animations from Celestia?Credits given to you guys, of course.

Keep on the good work.

Of course! This is exactly the sort of thing that the movie capture feature in Celestia was created for.

--Chris

The big earth texture is working nicely with my ATI radeon 32 megs. Impressive.

Will it work with a GeForce 2 PCI 32 MB card?

Mikeydude750 wrote:Will it work with a GeForce 2 PCI 32 MB card?

It works perfectly with my 32 MB GeForce 2 GTS card under Windows ME. Under Linux => SEGFAULT...
(like any .dds file)

Fridger

Mikeydude750 wrote:Will it work with a GeForce 2 PCI 32 MB card?

It works perfectly with my 32 MB GeForce 2 GTS card under Windows ME. Under Linux => SEGFAULT...
(like any .dds file)

Fridger

It works flawlessly on my GeForce GTS 32MB on Win. Great job Chris, it's awesome!

Pardon my asking (I'm sure it's been asked elsewhere), but what exactly is the procedure for adding, say, earth8k.dds? If I change these lines for earth's entry:



to:



and the switch to hi-res (shift-R) in Celestia, all I get is a crash. Am I doing something wrong?

Pardon my asking (I'm sure it's been asked elsewhere), but what exactly is the procedure for adding, say, earth8k.dds? If I change these lines for earth's entry:

You need to comment out the line 'CompressTexture True':

Texture "earth8k.dds"
# Texture "earth.png"
#CompressTexture True

8kx4k textures work fine on my 32MB Geforce2 GTS box. It's a bit choppy when the whole planet is in view (~5fps) but once you get closer to the surface it smooths out nicely. By my calculations, a 128MB card will be required for 16kx8k textures but we'll need to wait for 512MB graphics cards to use 32kx16k textures. I wonder how long that will be at the current rate of video card development..

You only need hi-res textures when you're very close to the planet. But when you're very close to the planet, you only see a small fraction of the planet's total surface. So you don't really need to have a huge hi-res texture in graphics memory to generate a close up view. What you need is to be able to split the full hi-res texture into smaller pieces which are selective loaded as required for the current view. Once you're able to do that, the graphics memory size is no longer a limiting factor.

- Hank