Celestia Forums

Celestia has the ability to select from LoRes, MedRes and HiRes textures. I am interested in finding out what that means to the most people. What is the optimal lo, med and hi texture size? I am sure this is useful to more designers than i. If many enough answers this poll, it will result in more usable Add-Ons...

As someone once (rightfully) accused me of here, most of my own work is unusable to most people because it is too massive for the average computer. I know that: it is because i design things to the limit of what my own machine can handle, looking for the perfect picture...

But for an Add-On release, this "maxed out" version obviously isn??t preferable, and i tend to scale the work down before publishing it. Yet the scaled-down version too is too much for many, it seems.

Well, vote in the poll, and you might get a Ran III that *is* optimized for your computer...

- rthorvald

I chose the 2nd option. I mainly use medres 2048x1024 textures.

Perso, my config allows me to use:

Lores: 512x256 jpg
Medres: 1024x512 jpg
Hires:4096x2048 dds if possible


To me the difference between a good 1k and a 2k is sometimes not enough important so finally I prefer a 4k in dds (for example for earth, I use a 4k spec, flat color, night and normal in dds and a 2k clouds; strangely, my card run all those maps without problem!)

I use VT only via the alt surface contextual menu.

I think the maximal useful resoution depends quite strongly on precisely what kind of texture or texture set we are talking about.

If the texture requires high fps rates clearly one should "go BIG" and use VT's. If we are talking about a whole set of non-VT OVERLAID textures then again one has to critically calculate the available memory.

With my card I can easily display a single 16k texture, yet there are significant loading times. This even works together with other textures in an overlay if the latter are in form of VT's.

For my card an 8k (multi) texture setup (even PNG) gives overall the smoothest performance, even smoother than VT's. I only go below 8k textures if there are no bigger ones available.

Clearly using monster VT sets like 32k - 64k is way better than anything else with my 19" monitor in 1600x1200 resolution.

Bye Fridger

I choose mainly the max resolution I found for nebulae texture.
Most of my add-ons are 1024x1024, because I haven't found bigger resolution.

Now, I'm working on Orion with bigger textures, up to 2048x4096 or 4096x4096.
With this size, flying through nebula is nicer, but loading is increased (up to 20 or 25 seconds )

That poll makes me realise that I can't manage to have lores textures for nebula !
Is it normal, or I made a mistake ?

JLL

ElChristou wrote:To me the difference between a good 1k and a 2k is sometimes not enough important so finally I prefer a 4k in dds

I think i was a little unclear:
A Virtual Texture in the HiRes slot is an essential part. This is to depict the surfaces in detail. So, the question really is:

- is the 1024 or the 512 tiles more user-friendly
- What is then preferable for the medres and lores slots?

- rthorvald

jll wrote:That poll makes me realise that I can't manage to have lores textures for nebula !
Is it normal, or I made a mistake ?

If you can??t switch resolution for nebulas, you can still make it in different resolutions and let the user choose manually...

- rthorvald

jll,

Don't forget that textures on models (which are used for Nebulas) are limited by the graphics card. Celestia cuts up larger textures only when drawing them on its internal spheres (planets and moons). Most graphics cards can display up to 1K textures, most ATI cards are limited to 2K, while most Nvidia can display 4K. VTs don't work on models, either.

If you specify a Texture for a Mesh in an SSC file, you can use r,R and AltSurface definitions(*). Those commands don't work for textures specified in material definitions within a Mesh, though

____
* -- They don't work in the OpenGL 2.0 Render Path in Celestia v1.4.1. That's fixed in the CVS code, so it'll be fixed in the next version of Celestia.

on my old -now defunked, box 512ram and an old nvidia g-force mx 400
an 8k map and an 8k normal with a 4k spectral and a 4k cloud ( earth) i run at about 8 fps .

so vt are the way i go.

so most older boxes should be able ( at low fps) to use 8k as the hires
or 4k ( at higher fps)as the hires

minde you i use uncompresed png's and not dds's or jpeg's