Celestia Forums

I'm no programming or math major. I'm just a lover of astronomy. I just love this program. Anyway I'll skip the small talk for now and just ask what I was going to.

I've downloaded a Hi-Rez earth. It is a .dds file. I seek help on what to do with this file to use it in Celestia. I already know my way around the keys in the program. Like moving, orbiting, displaying, switching resolution. So all I need to know is what to do outside of the program.

If this is something covered in a faq or tutorial somewhere I appologize. I just couldn't find help anywhere.

You can only use dds textures if you can view bump, spec & normalmaps (in other words you sould have a Geforce or good ATI graphics card)

Open up solarsys.ssc in the data folder, go down to the earth section, and find the "Texture" line. (NOT the one with a # before it)

Replace the existing "earth.png" or whatever with the name of your new texture.

Make sure your new texture is in the textures>hires folder (you can put it in medres later if you get an even higher res texture!)

Run celestia & you should be able to view it ok.

Welcome to Celestia forums, Teremei.

If you put a new texture into your medres folder and use it, it will be the default texture that celestia will load at start-up

if you put a bigger or smaller texture into the lores, or hires folders
you have to use the "Shift R" or "R" keys to switch between them.

Ok I have 2 problems. 1) what program do I use to open the .ssc file? 2) I do have a good enough card to handle it, and my earth texture is right now in my hi-rez folder.

I will try to put it in the med-rez folder but it doesn't seem like it would be the default texture because you probabaly have to do something to that file for the program to recognize it right?

ssc files can be opened with any standard text editor (notepad etc)

And you don't need to do anything with the image to get it to work with celestia- putting it in the medres folder doesn't really change anything, it just gives you more room to put in even higher res textures if you want!

Hi,
I would recommend looking at this http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celesti ... intro.html before doing any editing of the default Celestia files, you may find that you can accomodate most of the available addons,open them and more readily and conveniently replace the basic program, (as updates and pre-releases are quite often) using the filing structure outlined here. It's a choice though, some people run several versions, or customise one as they feel. Hope you have fun,
cheers j

1: download the texture you want (EG: Earth-16k.dds)
2: Place the texture into the medres folder
3: edit the soslarsys.ssc file with windows notepad
4: find the earth entry and change earth.png to earth-16k.dds in the texture line.
5: run celestia and goto earth.

6: enjoy your new texture

Ok, thanks Darkmiss, and everybody who helped!! I got it to work and I can tell a difference. WOW it is gorgeous! I downloaded it off Mike's add-on page I think. It was one of the CHOOSE only ONE BELOW files ======== I picked the largest file. It looks great even close up!!

Boy I can't wait to fill this baby with hi-rez planets.

If its Hires textures you are after,
Two new large textures have just been released.
And are extremely nice and detailed.

Praesepe's 16k Mars
http://www.shatters.net/~praesepe/files/MarsV3-Shaded-16K.zip

And Don Edwards 16k Earth
http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Central_v2/Texture_downloads/Realistic-Earth16kdds.zip

The earth file will need you to add a specular texture too,
to enable the suns reflection off the oceans

you can find this and other files at Don's Earth web site
http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Central_v2/Earth_Centralv2.html

Hi,
If I may add to previous advice re: display of addon hires textures.
The standard setup allows you to toggle between 3 textures ie lo, med & hi which are really any 3 textures that you put in the folders,you start with a lo and a med by default, so you can add a hi and then you have to start substituting. If you want to add more such as Bathemetry, Tectonic etc. then there is a further menu available by rightclicking the object (most alternates are for Earth so far) you can add as many as you like here, without editing the default ssc. file. You go to Celestia files-extras-create new folder-name it "addons"-open it-create new folder-name it ( for example)-"Sol earth"-place new ssc here with details of your addon, edit if you like as to what textures etc.you want to open with it-create new folder-name it "textures"-open it- create new folder-name it "medres"-put your texture in here. This means you can have plenty of alternates including the default ones, no need to edit the original ssc and when you want to install a new version of Celestia you just save your whole addon folder and wheel it back in ready to go. Sounds more complicated than it is - hope it works for you.
cheers *-)

Here's what I do to select what addons I want to load:

I have this stuff in my celestia.cfg file. Each line is a directory where I
keep different kinds of addons. I also have a directory called "storage"
where I keep things I don't want to use right now such as that really huge asteroid addon.



I keep the infrared Milky Way addon in the altwavelengths directory and fictional solar systems in the solarsys one. With the planets directory, I have extra planets for our solar systems such as Planet X and a Vulcan addon I made. Oh, I got to post that sometimes.
You can see that I try to collect every single addon. That's why I developed this to choose what is used. Otherwise Celestia won't finish loading all of them before the Suns becomes a red giant.
When I test a new feature, I comment out nearly everything and use the default small star data file and Celestia starts up quickly and I can see the starting script in action.

Brendan

hello,

i am new here in the board and i am impressed about Celestia.
but i have a problem with the earth16k file.

i did (hopefully correct) all these steps:
1: download the texture you want (EG: Earth-16k.dds)
2: Place the texture into the medres folder
3: edit the soslarsys.ssc file with windows notepad
4: find the earth entry and change earth.png to earth-16k.dds in the texture line.
5: run celestia and goto earth.

but after launching celestia and goto earth, i just have a lightblue planet with or wihout clouds.
can anybody help me? i hope the my graphic card i ok, and that i did something wron - but what.

thanks
ralph

Ralph,

It sounds like you did the right things.

However, I'd suggest you read the "preliminary user's FAQ" at the top of the "Celestia Users" forum. Q1/A1 and Q2/A2 were written with this kind of thing in mind.

hi,

if this is a problem from the graphic card, i can only try it on an other computer. (i can?t tell the name of this graphic card since it is a company PC and don?t have access to the settings)
i hope i have luck at home, but it would also make fun to play with celestia at work

ralph

It sounds like you might have a bit of a small graphics card
It might not have enough power or RAM to run this large 16k texture

Don also has smaller textures on his site
Try the 4k version, see if that works

Ralph,

The graphics card name is shown in Celestia's Help menu, OpenGL item.

hello everybody,

thank you very much for the help. but i still have no success.

here again all the steps i did:
i downloaded earth16k.dds, earth8k.dds and my last try was earth4k.dds from the web page http://63.224.48.65/~impulse/Earth_Cent ... ralv2.html

then i saved the each file in
C:\Programme\Celestia\textures\lores and C:\Programme\Celestia\textures\medres - actually also in C:\Programme\Celestia\textures\hires

then i opened
C:\Programme\Celestia\data\solarsys.ssc with an editor and changed this:

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "earth.png"
# Texture "earth8k.dds"
NightTexture "earthnight.jpg"

to this:

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "Earth4k.dds"
# Texture "earth8k.dds"
NightTexture "earthnight.jpg"

and saved the solarsys.ssc file.
i tried all 3 files (16k, 8k and 4k) and always changed the solarsys.ssc file according to it. but the earth in celestia is alway lightblue to white with or without clouds.

Open GL driver Info:

Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Renderer: GDI Generic
Version: 1.1.0
Max simultaneous textures: 1
Max texture size: 1024
Supported Extensions:
GL_WIN_swap_hint
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_paletted_texture


since i also tried the earth4k.dds without success, i don?t think that it is the graphic card???

thank you for your help

ralph

Ralph,

You need to upgrade the drivers for your graphics card from Microsoft's software routines to the ones provided by the manufacturer of your card. They should be free for downloading from the manufacturer's Web site.

If the manufacturer's drivers are already installed, then you need to turn on the hardware acceleration. It's currently disabled. Go to Display Properties, Settings tab, Advanced button, Troubleshoot tab, and move the Hardware acceleration slider all the way to the right. Then click on all the OK buttons.

Does this help?

@selden,

thank you for you help, i checked if the hardware acceleration is at max. and it is (at the very right) why do you think it isn?t?
i also downloaded the latest driver from intel, but i could not install it on that damn company computer since i do not have admin rights.

i guess all chances are gone and i have to play at home.

thanks
ralph

ralph wrote:thank you for you help, i checked if the hardware acceleration is at max. and it is (at the very right) why do you think it isn?t?

Because Celestia reports that only the MS software drivers are available. This happens both when no hardware-specific drivers are loaded and when hardware acceleration is disabled.

You should speak to the people maintaining the sytems to try to get them to install the appropriate graphics drivers.