Celestia Forums

Hi again...

I thought that before I screwed up my beautiful Celestia System as it's currently installed, I'd ask a question that may be useful to others as well.

The last time I installed a version of Celestia, I lost all of my textures, addons, and special ssc's.

Could one of you more educated types please explain how to do an update WITHOUT losing one's current favorite stuff?

I'm really looking forward to moving past Pre11, but I don't wish to do it, until I KNOW how to do it.

Thanks very much, Bob

Bob,

Here's what I do:

Rename the folder holding the old Celestia to be something else.
For example if you are using the folder Celestia, and it contains Celestia1.3.1pre11, rename that folder to be Celestia131p11

Install the new version of Celestia to the same directory that you used to use for Celestia.
For example if you had been using the folder Celestia, install the new version of Celestia into the folder Celestia again.

The desktop icon and the CEL associations will now point to the new copy of Celestia in the folder Celestia. All of your Addons are still in the folder Celestia131p11.

Then take your time and move your old Addons from Celestia131p11 to Celestia. If you want, you still can run the old version of Celestia by clicking on its icon in the folder Celestia131p11.

After you've moved all your Addons, you can delete the folder Celestia131p11.

Does this help?

You ARE the man, Selden...

You described what I was going to do, but for some reason I managed to screw this up when I went from 1.3.0 to 1.3.1 Pre11.

At any rate, I'll be MUCH more careful this time.

Thank you sir... By the way, when do YOU sleep?

Take care, Bob

Bob,

Be careful to just do a rename and not a delete!
Depending on how paranoid you're feeling and how much disk space it's using, you could do a "copy" instead.

I usually sleep between 11pm and 6am Eastern. Often I'll nap in the middle of the weekend, too.

I was going to go do some post-Christmas shopping today, but got distracted updating http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html. It now includes instructions for Virtual Textures.

I know someone posted a VT slice-and-dice procedure as well as a method for calculating which tiles correspond to what locations on the Earth, but I haven't been able to find either of them. The phpbb search AND function doesn't seem to be working correctly for me.

Any help finding them would be greatly appreciated.

Selden,

Just did a search for tiles AND earth, and got a whole boatload of topics to choose from...

Which one did you want?

Take care, Bob

Bob,

I managed to find the link to Fridger's virtualtex script -- the one that cuts large textures into small tiles.

I thought "Jim" Jens wrote a program that converts from latitude and longitude into the appropriate virtual texture tile filename, but I haven't been able to find it. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly who wrote it?

Thanks for your help!

Selden,

Is this what you were looking for?

http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3350&highlight=latitude+longitude+jens

Just thought I'd try to help...

Take care, Bob

Bob,

That's it! Thanks!

Odd, I just installed it and all of my addons are stuff are fine. In fact, nothing got removed.

Selden,

Just wanted to let you know that I followed ALL of your advice concerning the upgrade and everything went successfully.

Thanks *very* much for the explanation. I've seen other explanations of how to do upgrades using shortcuts, but I like the integrity of your answer AND your method. Everything worked out fine on my system.

Thanks again, Bob

Bob,

I'm glad it helped!

Now moving Addons over will be the problem, especially the ones that involved changes to solarsys.ssc and other Celestial files. I fear some of those changes will be hard to find -- that's why I decided to stop making them.

I always keep backups of important files. Before I install anything I first move my important files temporarily to another directory. A number of times my operating system gets messed up beyond repair, but that's no sweat. I just back up my important files and then reinstall the operating system, making sure I don't reformat the hard drive. While my system looks like its going through the carnage of an overhaul while I restore the operating system my backed up files are safe in another directory.

One thing Ive noticed since upgrading is a problem with Uranus. It no longer shows its rings but the ring shadows are still there.

RND wrote:One thing Ive noticed since upgrading is a problem with Uranus. It no longer shows its rings but the ring shadows are still there.

I think those are the rings you're seeing. Go to the satellite Cordelia and zoom back - you'll see the rings come into view, since Cordelia orbits within the outer part of the ring system.
Celestia's previous ring texture for Uranus was very inaccurate - the rings were placed wrongly, and they were far too broad. Even with the new 1k ring texture, they're still a little too broad - most of the rings should really be less than a pixel in width.

Grant

Yeah that wprls, thanks.