Celestia Forums

Hello!

I'm quite new to Celestia and i have some problems. I would be really thankful if you could help me because Celestia is so cool.

a) could you tell me what difference do these "normal maps" and "standard maps" have? and what are those specular maps?

b) I have now a 4k PNG texture on earth and it works fine, but i tried a 8k PNG texture and from close distance it worked fine, but when i zoomed out from earth it worked extremely slow (like watching a slide show). I tried to change the compression levels with irfanview from 0 to 9 but it didnt seem to help. cant my computer handle that big textures? ( i have 1.3GHz athlon, 896M sdram and radeon 9600XT). Another weird thing was that when i tried to use a 2400x1200 nightside lights file, it didnt work, it just loaded the original file, and i didnt have any typos in the names.

Thanks.

1. Normal maps are like bumpmaps, in that they tell the renderer how "high" part of the surface is, so that it can work out where the shadows go. But normalmaps are superior, because they also contain "slope" data, in the different colours. This means that shadows can be rendered more realistically.

2. Standard maps are just the surface texture of the planet

3. Specular maps are ones which tell celestia where to make the planet look "shiny". (ie on Earth, that would be the oceans). in the ssc file, you can specify the different colours which appear, and the strength of the specularity (shinyness)

4. If you can, you should use dds textures instead of PNG, or any other format for that matter! Also, Virtual textures are far more efficient and load faster than normal textures. Even with a super-fast computer, I wouldn't bother with normal textures, unless they're less than 4k.

From what you're saying, it sounds like you're using version 1.3.0 - you can get the latest version, 1.3.1prerelease 11, here: http://celestiaproject.net/celestia/files/cele ... 1pre11.exe

It's just so much better, in so many ways!

5. Textures in celestia must be 2x4 size, like your texture was, although they must be certain 2x4 sizes. Those sizes are:

1024x512
2048x1024
4096x2048
and so on...

Some of this stuff is probably covered in more detail, in the FAQ...