Hi Don,
Don. Edwards wrote:I don't think any normal Celestia user is going to willing to give up the ability to just point and click with the mouse and grab any planet and manhandle it the way we want. Scripting is fine if you want to go to a specific location but it will never replace the GUI or the mouse. If Celestia went in that direction I would be out of here faster than you can say "bad idea". If this is what we have to expect from the hi-res tiled textures than I can be counted out and I will not be participating in any texture creation that will preclude the use of the most important input device for Celestia. I was seriously considering to start to work on a 32k level texture tile package but if it is going to be bringing Celestia's GUI to its knees than I will not even start the work. I am more than happy with a 16k texture.
Are you perhaps misunderstanding something here? Nobody for sure would want to argue that any of the great GUI features of Celestia or Windows should be abolished!
The whole issue is that the
specific task of tile mass production from super hires 32k monster textures involves doing the same operations of selecting, cutting out and
correctly numbering tiles many many many times. Thus, this is the ideal application of scripting tools. Fabrication of these tiles by using the GUI e.g. in Photoshop or GIMP is simply out-of-the question. The ImageMackick image manipulation package was concerned with this aspect of batch controlled mass-manipulations on images from the beginning, i.e. since more than 10 years. Now these tools become most useful in the context of tiling, notably if controlled by a powerful unix-type shell, like 'zsh' or 'bash' or by a Perl API.
If you are not interested in 32k resolution, you can ignore all these issues, of course. No changes whatsoever.
However, after I and similarly various other users had installed the first 16k or 32k tiles, the effect was simply so breathtaking that I hardly can imagine going back to the 'classical' single texture scheme.
Clearly, in my case, given my 32MB (!!) oldtimer card, the effect of tiling is particularly gratifying!
We should tackle jointly the
problem of how to handle those large amounts of data for the benefit of other users. Downloading seems to be simply out. CD/DVD is an alternative, of course, but not quite obvious how to handle on a global scale...
Personally, I think that working together on a set of scripts for Cygwin/Linux, would make the production and installation sufficiently easy for most/many interested users.
Quite a few have succeeded already, it seems....
this is a space simulator not an Earth simulator as several members of this board have stated in the past.
No-one involved in tiles would want to see tiles confined to Earth! The great thing about them is that parts of textures with
different resolution can be blended in the tiling process. Chris is going to further improve the smoothness of this blending.
Think of Europa for example. There is amazing 8k data, but not for the full surface. You may just use the tiles from those 8k data where available and blend them with the usual 2k or 4k ones. Mars is another great application for tiles. 16k Moon textures etc....
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People with older graphics cards can now run 8k, 16k textures at high fps rates. I think this is worth some effort, already!
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I would be much more receptive to being able to use 8k clouds maps than to use a 32k texture even in tiled mode. As you get that close to the surface the clouds look absolutely horrible at that resolution. At least an 8k cloudmap could extend the detail down farther.
I still use my 'classic' 2k clouds;-) Sometimes they indeed look rather 'digital'. I agree. But often, they are also still surprisingly good, even with 32k resolution.
Note: clouds tend to cover the surface up, hires surface textures emphasize the surface details and clouds are in the way, be it 2k or 8k;-) I am often tempted to switch the clouds off now and explore that amazing surface detail...But perhaps other people prefer to look at detailed clouds instead...
Bye Fridger
or your favorite crevice in Valles Marineris.
(its been a hard day and I have to go work until 8am now).