Celestia Forums

i know there are add-ons for mars 32k or 64k virtual texture.when i installed them in my celestia folders,i found the format of the texture are in png format,and it ran very slow.
i just want to ask if there are any dds format virtual texture files for us to download,thankyou.

Hello,
The Celestia Motherlode should contain all the Mars surface textures that are publicly availalblle. If those are not DDS, the only solution may be to convertthem yourself, which is pretty tricky. See the tools and documentation sections of the site for details. If you do succeed, plesae submit the files to the motherlode so that we can make them available.

Cheers,
Joe

In case of Mars the issue is certainly not one of conversion to DXTn format . It turns out --given the particular Mars topology and colors -- that the deterioration of the normal map VT's due to DXTn conversion is particularly visible! Some months ago I published detailed studies about this effect in the forum.

To convert a 16k normal map to DXT3 takes me less than a minute with my own conversion tool (texconvert). Yet, since long, I went back to PNG VT's for the normal map. The main texture is tolerable in DXT3, though.


Bye Fridger