Bob:
No, I meant that
perhaps you can get around your card limitation using VTs.
It was my case. Some time ago I downloaded a 8k texture of earth. I tried to use it, but my old 32Mb video card couldn?t handle it. It was so incredible slow that it turned to be completely unusable.
So I returned to my 4k earth texture, which worked OK.
When 1.3.1 became available, I downloaded a 32k VT of earth up to level 4 included. It works very well, with the only drawback of the usual delays when a new tile is loaded from disk.
If your case is similar to mine, then you can try it and see if it solves the problem.
A VERY simplistic explanation of VT:
Imagine you want to use a very large texture (16-32k) in Celestia. Probably your system could not handle it, so -as a solution- you can split it in pieces, in order to use only those that you really can see in the screen. The ones that are hidden (for example, on the opposite side of the planet) are not used.
It saves a lot of resources, so you will be able to use that big texture.
VT uses a more efficient approach: when you see earth from, let?s say 100.000 km, you really do not need to use a giant texture because earth will be very small in your screen and thus you will waste a lot of detail. So you can use a smaller texture.
When you get closer, the size of earth in screen will get bigger and more detail will be needed. If you continue to use that small texture, you will see a blocky view. So you need a bigger texture.
And so on...
When I say that I use a 32k earth map up to level 4, I mean that I have 5 earth textures (0,1,2,3,4) each one bigger than the previous (not only bigger, but more detailed, of course). They are stored in different folders (level0, level1, level2, level3, level4).
But as I said, these textures are not in one piece, but splitted into tiles, to improve render efficiency. This whole set, plus a text .ctx file, is called a VT.
You may find a problem with VT: they are huge (about 100 mb and more for a 16-32k one). They are slow to download.
So, before attepting to download one, let?s do your own short version (that you can expand later):
1 ) in your celestia\hires folder create a new folder called earth
2 ) inside of it, create a folder called level0 (without spaces)
3 ) with the GIMP, create 2 images 1024x1024 in rgb: one red, the other blue, and save them as tx_0_0.jpg and tx_1_0.jpg inside the level0 folder.
4 ) with Notepad, create a new text file and write this in it:
Code: Select all
VirtualTexture
{
ImageDirectory "earth"
BaseSplit 0
TileSize 1024
TileType "jpg"
} 5 ) save it as earth.ctx in your celestia\hires folder
6 ) go to your celestia\data and in solarsys.ssc copy it as solarsys.bck (a backup copy) and change the line (in solarsys.ssc)
Texture "earth.*"
with
Texture "earth.ctx"
7 ) run celestia. Go to earth, orbit it, etc. If you can see the planet painted with the blue and red colors, then VT will be a solution for you.
And that?s all. I hope I am not forgetting something.
Hope this works. If not, try resampling the blue and red textures to 512*512 or 256*256 and change the 1024 in earth.ctx with 512 or 256 as it should
