Celestia Forums

I have downloaded some textures of earth (jpeg and dds), but i can't use them. This is my computer:
P4 2.4
128mb GF4 mx440 agp 8x
256mb ddr ram
Also i have the plug in for photoshop but it doesn't work. And i couldn't find 1.3.1 for Windows. Please help.

Carlos Ortega wrote:I have downloaded some textures of earth (jpeg and dds), but i can't use them.

What do you mean by "can't use them"? Exactly what is going wrong?

Also i have the plug in for photoshop but it doesn't work.

I have no experience with the plugin, so I can't help with that problem.

And i couldn't find 1.3.1 for Windows. Please help.

Please read the "Preliminary User's FAQ" at the top of this forum at http://63.224.48.65/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2291 Question/Answer #0 at the very beginning tells where to get the current version of Celestia.

Does this help?

I mean that i have textures in .dds and .jpeg formats but Celestia needs .png format.
Thanks for the link; now i am downloading the 1.3.1-1(2). After downloading maybe i found another question .
Thanks...

Carlos,

Celestia can use any of those three formats: PNG, JPG or DDS.
The image files must be a power of two on a side.

selden wrote:Celestia can use any of those three formats: PNG, JPG or DDS.

DDS however won't work with old graphicscards which have no support for texture compression.

Harald

My graphic card is GeForce4 mx440 AGP 8x. I use Windows 98SE. How can I use bump and specular map in Celestia.
---thanks again for the link, now i am using 1.3.1-1(2)

Carlos,
In order to use the .dds textures and other features you have to edit your solarsys.scc so it tells Celestia what textures to load. You will this file in the "DATA" folder/directory inside your Celestia folder/directory. Look inside for a file called solarsys.ssc and use notepad or better wordpad to open it. It is a simple text document so editing it is very easy but if not done carefully can render Celestia DOA.
Inside the file it should look somewhat like this. We will use a section for Earth's settings.

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "Your-Earth.dds"
NightTexture "Your-Earth-Night.dds"
SpecularTexture "Your-Earth-Specular.dds"
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
SpecularPower 20.0
HazeColor [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 6378.140 # equatorial
# Oblateness 0.0034

NormalMap "Your-Earth-NormalMap.dds"
BumpMap "Your-Earth-Bump.dds"
BumpHeight 4.5

Atmosphere {
Height 75
Lower [ 0.43 0.52 0.65 ]
Upper [ 0.26 0.47 0.84 ]
Sky [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
Sunset [ 1.0 0.6 0.2 ]
# Sunset [ 0.3 1.0 0.5 ]
CloudHeight 15
CloudSpeed 00
CloudMap "Your-Earth-Clouds.dds"
}

All the entries you see in red are the ones that you can plug-in the texture you want to use. One thing is that if you use a NormalMap instead of a BumpMap you need to set the BumpMap to 0.0 or strange thing will happen. Most likely Celestia will crash. The reason for this is if you use a BumpMap you need to specify the height you want to emulate. A NormalMap has these height settings already plugged in them so you need to set this to zero. Also take note of the # symbol. This is used to turn textures, features, and settings on and off. Anything with a # in front of it is turned off by default. Be removing the # you can activate a feature or texture. So say you want to use a NormalMap instead of a bumpMap, you would place a # and then a space in front of the BumpMap entry. By saving the file and launching Celestia you should now not be using a BumpMap but a NormalMap if you gave an entry for one. After you do this a few times you will get the hang of it. Also you will see these "}" brackets. Make sure they do not get moved or your .ssc file will not work.
AS for getting a specular reflections effects you need to have first have a SpecMap entry in your solarsys.ssc. Again see above for where the entry is. If you plug in the SpecMap properly and load Celestia You should see reflections on the water. Your video card is more than capable of doing the job as even a first generation GeForce card can do them. It is all in the entries in the solarsys.ssc and your texture files. Always make sure you have the name right. I always right click the texture I want to use and use the rename option and then copy the name into the clipboard and then just save the name as is. Now when you go into the .ssc file all you have to do is select the section you need to paste into and paste the name in. This is a good way for a beginner to do it. Also you can just give your textures very simple names like Earth-3.dds or something like that. Some of the names on the texture I release have gotten rather large and some users may want to change the name to something shorter.
Once you master the editing of the .ssc file you are on your way.
Also I suggest before getting into to the gutts of your solarsys.ssc to make a backup copy just incase. I have totaled out my fair share of .ssc files over the last few years.
I hope this helps answer your questions in a more complete fashion.

Don. Edwards

Thanks for these hints. But i can't use bumpmap (celesita crashes). Is the reason my graphic card? Are there any differences between bump and normal map? Where can I find normal map textures?

Carlos,
There is no reason you can't use a bumpmap. Your card is more than capable of doing it. What you need to at this point is make sure that your bumpmap is the right size. There are a few textures and bumpmaps floating around the web that are not sized right for use in Celestia. As said many time by many people make sure your textures and bumpmaps are a power of 2. This means that your textures must be at minimum 256x256, 512x512 ,1024x1024, 2048x2048. Or the more normal sizes are 1024x512, 2048x1024, 4096x2048, 8192x4096, 16384x8192. You will notice that the most commonly used texture are always 2 times the length as the height. Your textures or bumpmaps must be in the sizes you see above. If you downloaded a texture or bumpmap and it is per say 10500x5250 than you will need to use a photo/image editor to resize the texture or bumpmap to the size of 8192x4096. You could size it up to 16384x8192 but you will be actually loosing detail by doing this. Stretching an image of 10500x5250 to that size is just going to make it blurry. So if your textures are of strange sizes it is always the standard rule to choose the size that is nearer to one of the targeted sizes. Again if your texture would happen to be 10500x5250 than resize it to 8192x4096 and it should work just fine. Yes you will loose some detail by shrinking the image but in the long run this means you can load more textures into your video cards memory.
One other thing that you should now. If you end up using textures that are not of the .dds format but of the .jpg and .png format than there is a line of code you should enter to have Celestia compress the textures on the fly to save you video memory. If you run out of video memory this will also crash Celestia. The line of code should look like this.

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "Your-Earth.dds"
CompressTexture true
NightTexture "Your-Earth-Night.dds"
SpecularTexture "Your-Earth-Specular.dds"
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
SpecularPower 20.0
HazeColor [ 0.40 0.6 1.0 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 6378.140 # equatorial
# Oblateness 0.0034
This will make Celestia's load times a little longer but it will allow you to use larger textures and make more efficient use of your video cards memory. If you load any .DDS textures for your entries than be sure to turn off this feature with # and a space. If you use the CompressTexture true command and use a .DDS texture than that will crash Celestia as well. This is one of the main reasons we are moving more and more over to the .DDS texture format. It is more efficient and you can load more textures into memory. Also be advised that using the CompressTexture true entry can be used for each planet entry in your solarsys.ssc . This again may make loading times a little longer but you will be able to use larger and more textures for your planets.
So basically give these a try and have fun trying these things out. If your textures are sized right and you use your video cards memory wisely you can really get away with using quite large textures with bumpmaps, night-side, and cloud textures. I was able to use all these textures and features on my old GeForce 2 MX 200 card with only 32MB of VRAM. So you can see your card really can do more. Hope this helps as well.

Don. Edwards

Could you send your "solarsys" file to me?
comuratcan@hotmail.com
And could you give a link to the textures that you are using?