Celestia Forums

OK,

what is a .dds file, i spent all day downloading them for my newley aquired celestia, and i do not know how to install them, and can not find out how. they are texture files, and as i have a very high end system, i want to push the program to the max.


any help greatly apreciated.

A DDS file is a graphics file just like any other BMP, JPG,.....
except it can't be viewed by most graphice editors or viewers.
DDS is nvidias own compressions format.

Its also the best format to use with Celestia
90 percent of all my textures are DDS, large or small.

it has somthing to do with the texture decompressing directly to the video ram.
( I think I got that right ) cant remeber exactly.
the deocompression rate is also faster than most file types too.

but these textures can only be used on Nvidia cards of Geforce 2 pro and above

or Radion cards of 9600 or above (not to sure on this one either )

safetyPyro wrote:OK,

what is a .dds file, i spent all day downloading them for my newley aquired celestia, and i do not know how to install them,

If you'd like to use DDS files, you can simply install them as you would any other texture file. See Paul's answer above.

However, if you wish to convert DDS files to another, more familiar format, you can do that too. Simply open the DDS file using a graphics program like Irfanview and then save the texture into whatever format you like.

Hope that helps.

Take care, Bob

More info to the official website :

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_t ... tools.html

Thanx for your help, i havent had time to test it yet, but i think it wioll work, if it works with an ATI 9800XT

Hi safetyPyro,
dds =direct draw surface, quicker to load as its read directly by graphic card.You cant open them with standard windows viewer etc. Thumbnail viewer available for free from Nvidia, shows a thumbnail in the left pane of the folder you are in, it's ok but is often in trouble (lots of thrashing about, lock ups etc) with big single textures ie. not tiled. I use (free) XnView a good (bug/ad/ frustration free) piece of software, quite small download, which will show you all sorts of files including dds, in a selectable range of view sizes, also converts etc etc. It doesnt convert jpg etc to dds, if you want to do this, to make your own tiles etc, I have used the tool that comes with Orbiter, another free space type program,(worth a look too if you like space sims);you can only do one file at a time with this though, there are other better options for this as I'm sure you will find if you get into this in a serious way, if you're just experimenting give it a go. Hope it all works for you, z

I'm sure someone else has already mentioned this, but IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.de/) also reads DDS files. Saves as jpg, gif, etc, not as DDS, tho. Of course, PhotoShop reads/saves DDS files, for those of us with the money for it...

WrenNoir wrote:I'm sure someone else has already mentioned this, but IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.de/) also reads DDS files.

You're absolutely right : Bob mentionned it 4 posts ago

Darkmiss wrote:

but these textures can only be used on Nvidia cards of Geforce 2 pro and above or Radion cards of 9600 or above (not to sure on this one either)

DDS files work fine on my Radeon 7000 VE. The only think that doesn't seem to work in Celestia with this card is normal, bump, and specular maps.

Dave

OK thank you for your help. now that I know what a .dds file is, would you please tell me how to, or where i can find out how to, put my 8k by 4k earth skin (or whatever) into celestia so that it loads instead of the defualt one

thank you

SafetyPro,

If you haven't already, please take a look at the Web page http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html

Please let me know what improvements it needs.