A note from Don

[Don. Edwards]

Hey everyone,
I just finished responding to a posting in the thread about Earth Central's Update and I went into some inportant points about the textures I made.
Here is what I wrote because I feel everyone should know my feelings and plans for the future.

ElChristou wrote,

Hello, Don. Edwards

Very nice site. Tx.

A suggestion:

Why don't you put a link to 8K and 16k png files? ...dds is not a lossless format...

My response got rather long winded but I as I said I feel everyone in the forum that follows my work should know this.

ElChristou,

The simple reason is download file size restraints. I could make the 8k PNG textures available but the 16k is just to big weighing in at 384MB per texture and that adds up to me uploading 2.3 Gigabytes of files. I can?€™t do that with only a 128kb DSL upload pipe. Besides you couldn't use it in Celestia anyway unless it was converted to a VT and I haven?€™t given anyone permission to do that as of yet. I have checked very carefully and the balance of quality between the PNG and the DDS files I make are fairly close. Sure there is going to be some loss of detail but is not really apparent until you start zooming very close to the texture. In all honesty the best you are going to get from any 16k texture is in orbit of the planet at about 1200 kilometers up. Any closer, even if it was a PNG file the texture starts to loose focus quickly. To go to the next level of detail will take a 32k or true 64k texture.

To be truthful with everyone there was a short time that I really was not going to release the Seasonal Earth 16k textures at all. I was considering taking the 16k textures to the next level and possibly charging or asking for a donation for them. But I changed my mind on this after I did some soul searching. But even with GPL licensing I can charge for the textures because I am totally altering them from there original form and I would be charging not really for the texture itself but for my time and labor I put into the textures changes.
I have been approached by a few professional groups that have used my textures for professional and state government projects and afterward they sent me images of what they did with them. So I know now my textures are up to the Professional level.
So to let everyone know right off the bat so to speak I am in the very early stages of making 32k Seasonal textures of the Earth but they will be strictly for licensed use and or private use after paying a nominal fee for them. I spent a great many hours on these 16k textures so everyone can enjoy them but there has to be a balance between time well spent using my creative skills and just me being silly and whiling away my time for nothing but a pat on the back. This is not to say that I will stop making textures for the Celestia community because I still plan to do that. But if I am going to spend over 300+ hours making a texture than I need to get something more out of it. Now multiply that time to each of the Seasonal Earth textures and you start to get my point. It is simple economics unfortunately. If I want to make the largest and best textures I can of the Earth I need first the time, second the hardware, my computer as it stands was a fairly powerful machine being a based on an Athlon XP 3200 with 1.5gigs of RAM. But making the seasonal textures brought my machine to its knees on more than one occasion. What this means is that when this happened I lost the work I was doing and had to go back to an earlier version of the texture and start again. So I am looking at a major upgrade to my working hardware. I have to pay for that and that takes money. So you can see why I had given the thought to charging for these textures a serious consideration. And with my work starting to catch the eye of professionals this really becomes an important point for me. The main reason I didn?€™t was I simply did not want the back-lash that would no doubt ensue from some members of the Celestia community.
Sorry this has become a major response but I felt it was important for everyone to know were I am coming from on this. I hope this answered your question and then some.

Don. Edwards