Celestia Forums

I am wondering just how far celestia can go with hi res textures.

Dowloaded a 13 mb mars jpg for open universe, would like a similar res or better for good old earth. How far could this go before system bugs? for myself I have 380 mb ram, 32 mb graphics.

I was orbiting with ISS, and just like looking out the window, but blurry at that altitude.

DRG

I shoud'nt be a too hard task to add a render option which enable
a stereo view in Celestia.
You can let the eyes distant to be autamatically setted depending
on the distance of the selected object, or hardly defined by hand.
Stereo view can definitely get the observer INSIDE the space....

Right now, Celestia can only load textures up to the maximum size supported by your graphics card. For a GeForce3 (and also for a Radeon 8500 I expect) the max texture size is 4096x4096. Other nVidia and ATI chipsets support only 2048x2048. A Voodoo3 can only handle 256x256 textures; Matrox cards do somewhat better with large textures and can handle 1024x1024.

I'm working on supporting higher resolution textures by splitting extremely large textures into smaller texture patches. So a 4096x2048 image would get split into 8 1024x1024 textures on a card with a maximum texture dimension of 1024. At extremely high resolutions, texture compression (internally on the graphics card, not the image file itself) becomes extremely important--you won't be using 8192x4096 Earth texture without some form of compression.

--Chris

It seems to me you only need those huge textures when you get close to the planet. But when you're close, only a small part of the surface is visible. So you only need to load a few of the texture patches at any given time, depending on what part of the surface is visible. Am I missing something? (The trick, of course, is to determine efficiently which patches are visible... but that doesn't seem impossible.)

- Hank