Celestia Forums

Posted: **18.09.2002, 20:58**

abiogenesis wrote:Speaking of large Earth maps, I downloaded the BlueMarble maps from NASA. 16kx16k for each hemisphere. I've tried to combine them into one, gargantuan 32,768 x 16,384 pixel image, but my PC seems to have a low tolerance for pain. :wink:

Has anybody (Fridger) got this to work? I'm using an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 1GB PC2700 333Mhz DDR RAM. I also have a 120GB hard drive and I set it up with a 4GB page file (XP's upper limit), but Gimp still falls to its knees. The video card shouldn't even come into it, but I'm using a geForce 3, so it should be okay anyway.

I realize that a 32k texture is pretty much pointless, but its the principle of the thing!

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

Posted: **18.09.2002, 21:00**

It might be your video card....You might want to consider upping to a 128 meg video card soon....but still windows just doesnt like big files *cough*conventional memory*cough* Tho I think XP and Win 2000 is supposed to help with this barrier....

I would maybe use Linux assuming of course your not already....or buy a MAC :mrgreen:

Posted: **18.09.2002, 21:04**

abiogenesis wrote:Speaking of large Earth maps, I downloaded the BlueMarble maps from NASA. 16kx16k for each hemisphere. I've tried to combine them into one, gargantuan 32,768 x 16,384 pixel image, but my PC seems to have a low tolerance for pain. :wink:

Has anybody (Fridger) got this to work? I'm using an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 1GB PC2700 333Mhz DDR RAM. I also have a 120GB hard drive and I set it up with a 4GB page file (XP's upper limit), but Gimp still falls to its knees. The video card shouldn't even come into it, but I'm using a geForce 3, so it should be okay anyway.

I realize that a 32k texture is pretty much pointless, but its the principle of the thing!

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

No, I also failed miserably despite a number of attempts and playing with all sorts of memory tricks I know. (I have 512kb of RAM and a PIII 1GHz).

As soon as I'll find some more time, I shall use the Gimp batch commands. That should work.

Also I know that Pixel managed to do some elementary operations on those monster files with an old DOS based batch programme.

This would be quite essential, since the color etc. of the standard 16k file is quite oversaturated...

Bye Fridger

Posted: **18.09.2002, 21:13**

Thanks, guys. If you find a solution, I'd be glad to hear it. I was looking at the Script-Fu stuff you can do with Gimp, but I don't have the time to study up on all that right now.

Oh well. I wish you luck.

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

Posted: **18.09.2002, 21:24**

Another critical issue is the DXT1 conversion of 16k textures by means of 'nvdxt'. I find --in agreement with Pixel-- that the actual nvdxt version crashes badly on those files. Pixel sent me an older nvdxt which worked for him, but which still crashes on my machine...

The whole effort is useless without DXT conversion...

So for those reasons, the 16k DDS earth I am using so far is still the "raw" texture from Pixel that he (and only he it seems) managed to obtain by reduction from those 43x21k gigantic textures. This file shows much more detail, however, than the 21k earth available on the Blue Marble server. Pixel used a very good scaling algorithm, though.

Bye Fridger

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4k earth.dds with specular reflection