Celestia Forums

I have installed Celestia 1.4.0 from source on my Slackware Linux 10.0 box. There are some problems but, since I currently need a stable system and have limited time for a major upgrade, I'd first like to understand whether these are actual Celestia bugs, or the consequences of an incorrect setup.

I have configured Celestia like this:

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--prefix=/usr/local/celestia --with-kde --with-lua=/usr/local/lua

I use KDE 3.2.2 and an nVidia GeForce FX 5600 Ultra card with 256 MB of RAM (driver 1.5.3, 71.74).

Concerning the problems I mentioned, Celestia displays at startup an error about missing the splash screen, and then some menu entries are apperently missing. The problems are described in this Celestia Users thread http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8579 .

Also, I have tried to install this Earth virtual texture and normal map:

32K Earth Surface Map
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=57

8K Earth Normal Map
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/show_addon_details.php?addon_id=486

The files are in /usr/local/celestia/share/celestia/textures/hires. I have also created a file called 'alternates.ssc" in the extras directory containing:

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AltSurface "Hires VT" "Sol/Earth"
{
        Texture "earth-unshaded-hs-32k.ctx"
        NormalMap "earth-normal.ctx"
        Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
        SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
        SpecularPower 25.0
        HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
        HazeDensity 0.3
}

But when I switch to the alternate surface 'Hires VT', the Earth turns into a white ball and the texture doesn't appear.

The file permissions seem correct and Celestia works fine with the default texture with both the Basic and the Multitexture render paths.


Paolo

The normal map is somehow the most important texture for the final display. I would advise to rather take a bigger sized, high-quality normal map, in exchange of a possibly smaller sized main earth map. It is extremely important that the normal map has been done by an /expert/ in these matters, since the smoothness of that texture is crucial for a pleasing hires rendering.

Good normal maps should start from the published 16bit gray level maps, rather than 8bit, for example. We have a special tool nm16 that converts the original 16bit level maps to high-quality normal maps, such that the generated noise remains very small!


Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:The normal map is somehow the most important texture for the final display. I would advise to rather take a bigger sized, high-quality normal map, in exchange of a possibly smaller sized main earth map.

Thanks for the advice. Just for debugging purposes, the same virtual texture and normal map I mentioned in my original post worked fine on the same machine with Celestia 1.3.2 and the GTK frontend.

Thanks again,


Paolo

amoroso wrote:Celestia displays at startup an error about missing the splash screen, and then some menu entries are apperently missing.

This suggestion by Pat http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic ... 5724#65724 of setting the KDEDIRS environment variable solves both problems.

amoroso wrote:Also, I have tried to install this Earth virtual texture and normal map: [...] But when I switch to the alternate surface 'Hires VT', the Earth turns into a white ball and the texture doesn't appear.

I am still investigating the virtual textures issue.


Paolo

a vt dose not nead to be done as an alt surface
it sounds as the entry in the solsys.ssc is a bit wrong
take anouther look at it or post it and maby we can figure out what is wrong

john Van Vliet wrote:a vt dose not nead to be done as an alt surface
it sounds as the entry in the solsys.ssc is a bit wrong
take anouther look at it or post it and maby we can figure out what is wrong

I did not change the solsys.ssc file that comes with celestia 1.4.0. I instead created one called extras/Addons/earth-hires-vt/earth-hires-vt.ssc that contains, as I mentioned in an above post:




Paolo Amoroso