News from SPACE-GRAPHICS.COM Textures

[MarYo]

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[the bluemarble guy]

ummm... some places charge over $1000 U.S for textures of the size that are default to celestia. I probably would glady pay 60 dollars for a 23k texture.

[Pixel]

Hello Mario,

congrats for your good textures! I don't know if they are
the best though. And in which sense.
I thing that the current issue is not related to your
decision to sell textures. The problem is that Celestia
is free software and ppl here belongs to so called free
community. They are hobist and are glad to share their
creations for free. If your textures cost money it is obvious
that they could not be used for Celestia project.
Saying that, your advertisment in this forum can well be considered as
a spam. Espetially comments about objective price. The price really will not solve the problem.
Regards
Pixel.

[t00fri]

Hello Mario,

congrats for your good textures! I don't know if they are
the best though. And in which sense.
I thing that the current issue is not related to your
decision to sell textures. The problem is that Celestia
is free software and ppl here belongs to so called free
community. They are hobist and are glad to share their
creations for free. If your textures cost money it is obvious
that they could not be used for Celestia project.
Saying that, your advertisment in this forum can well be considered as
a spam. Espetially comments about objective price. The price really will not solve the problem.
Regards
Pixel.

Hey Pixel,

I completely agree with what you say and actually have already written Mario an email with the same points. For me US$ 20 is the same as US$ 60. Both effectively means that SpaceGraphics textures will in future not be used anymore in a /closer/ sense in the Celestia project. Clearly, individuals are always free to buy these textures for whatever they are willing to pay for them.

In the same sense, what does it help, if Don is given free download;-). He will not be allowed to give them to others for free I guess...

So what! Commercial textures and Celestia are simply not made for each other...


Bye Fridger

[Guest]

It is best to find a neutral ground where both can stand and see what truly lies within the others heart in this instance. Commercialism in the truest sense of the word implies a commodity others will need and Capitalism in this reality is the exploitation of that commodity to the point of robbing the public. I dont see that here. Celestia also is another form of this commodity that the public demands. If it were to become a threat to Chris's way of life in a sense of putting him in the 'poor house' so to speak I would expect him to charge a small fee just to keep it alive. Would you all abandon the project because of this? Or would not asking him first what is the purpose?

The true integrity of the man lies in how he controls his ego. Once one begins to profit from something, will he take advantage of that or will he muzzle the ego and allow only for the spirit to control the situation. The spirit cares not for wealth but for the contuinual progression of all. so all may benefit. I suppose the best course of action for anyone who feels they must set a price on something is to ask themselves for what purpose does it serve? The one or the many?

I apologize if I have offended anyone, that is not my direction with this.

[the guardian]

Ahh using Internet Explorer I have the same problem as some here. I log in to find I must log in twice. Suppose it is best to use the mighty penguin to browse these forums 8)

[MarYo]

Hi Pixel.

Yes, you are right when you write about spam but it's really not my intention to advertize nothing here, the only reason of my post is to reply and express my point of view to Don about a topic title and contents that I rate slighty excessive.

Later (now I'm at work, aghrr!!) I write Don if he can build a DDS texture version public domain (targeted for space simulator or similar sw.). I've never worked with DDS compression tool. I see that a PS plugin is available. Can someone of you point me to a quick how to link ?

Can we consider this issue solved and everybody friendly again ? I would like to continue to have a feature rich technical cooperation with all the celestia users.

Bye

Mario

[Pixel]

Hello Mario,

as I know there are plugins for PS and dos tools for
DXT compression. But they seem don't work on large textures.
Fridger had several tips how to avoid this, but it seems
to me that people still have problems with this. So I can
propose my solution. It is little bit barberian but works.
interested people can get it from here:
http://free.bol.bg/pixel/CreateBigDDS.zip


Bye
Pixel.

[MarYo]

Thanks pixel, I will grab the file when at home.

Mario

[Pixel]

Hi Fridger,

Now I guess you have to detach your 16K Earth to mipmaps, to delete these under 16K resolution and to create new ones by resizeing your 16K collor-corrected variant.
BTW do you need my nice 16K Polar Caps. I can give you them both for free.
Bye
Pixel.

[t00fri]

Hi Fridger,

Now I guess you have to detach your 16K Earth to mipmaps, to delete these under 16K resolution and to create new ones by resizeing your 16K collor-corrected variant. ;)
BTW do you need my nice 16K Polar Caps. I can give you them both for free. :wink:
Bye
Pixel.

Hi Pixel,

my new 16k earth texture (as well as the respective 16k normal map) is finished and packed, waiting to be transferred to the TextureFoundry. The color of the 16k BlueMarble texture is perfectly
matched to the SG-Render earth color.

There is a problem however that arose with Mario's recent decision to ask money for the larger SG textures. If these textures continue to cost money (no matter how much), I shall /eliminate any traces/ of SpaceGraphics (<=8k) from all my textures and thus will have to start partly over again...

But I have all mipmaps separately stored anyway...


Concerning Mars, I now have completed a true 16bit/channel 16k resolution elevation map from the 64pix/degree MOLA data. Since GIMP and Photoshop are both not suitable for genuine 16bit/channel work, I did all this with the latest versions of /Imagemagick/ that exists /free/ both for Linux and Windows (http://www.imagemagick.org). It has full 16bit/channel (batch) capability and works very well after some practicing. There is an additional advantage do run most commands on the console (no XServer under Linux!): lots of additional RAM;-). Moreover I use all commands in a script, hence they exactly repeat for every texture size.

In order to get this into a DXT-encoded 16k normal map I still have to do some coding work;-).

But the results for 8k bumpmaps (in *.PNG) are very nice already.

Another challenge is to match the bump map offsets to < 1 pixel accuracy to the main textures...


I would love to get your 16k polar caps!

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Hello Mario,

as I know there are plugins for PS and dos tools for
DXT compression. But they seem don't work on large textures.
Fridger had several tips how to avoid this, but it seems
to me that people still have problems with this. So I can
propose my solution. It is little bit barberian but works.
interested people can get it from here:
http://free.bol.bg/pixel/CreateBigDDS.zip


Bye
Pixel.

Well here is again a brief summary of my "16k weapons":

(0) Doug [NVIDIA] is working hard to massively reduce the memory consumption and improve the memory management in his tools. He also incorporates some code from the DevIL library (that I mainly use).
Everybody is looking forward to the result...

(1) I do most of my 16k conversion work under Linux: everything is /very/ fast and works without problems for 16k.

a) GIMP normal map plugin (URL on Doug's page)

b) my own DevIL-lib based DXT-conversion and DXT-display tools for Linux. They work fine and fast. Moreover, I can add new features any time I need some;-).

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

It is best to find a neutral ground where both can stand and see what truly lies within the others heart in this instance. Commercialism in the truest sense of the word implies a commodity others will need and Capitalism in this reality is the exploitation of that commodity to the point of robbing the public. I dont see that here. Celestia also is another form of this commodity that the public demands. If it were to become a threat to Chris's way of life in a sense of putting him in the 'poor house' so to speak I would expect him to charge a small fee just to keep it alive. Would you all abandon the project because of this? Or would not asking him first what is the purpose?

The true integrity of the man lies in how he controls his ego. Once one begins to profit from something, will he take advantage of that or will he muzzle the ego and allow only for the spirit to control the situation. The spirit cares not for wealth but for the contuinual progression of all. so all may benefit. I suppose the best course of action for anyone who feels they must set a price on something is to ask themselves for what purpose does it serve? The one or the many?

I apologize if I have offended anyone, that is not my direction with this.

You rather sound like a philosopher...Who are you by the way?

An automatic cyber script?-)

As concerns myself, I only participate in the development of the Celestia code and other things, as long as the projects are OpenSource.

My long experience in joint internet programming has clearly shown that even a /tiny commercial touch/ changes the nature of such projects as well as the attitude of the users towards it /completely/.

Bye Fridger

[jim]

Hi Mario,

Fist thanks a lot for your nice textures (althogh i do no longer use a texture based on yours since last weekend ).
I think i have a solution for your problem. Celestia can't use 11k or 23k textures. All textures must have dimensions with a power of two (16k, 8k, 4k, ...) and the prime meridian must be in the center of the map. How about if you build special versions of your textures for free use with celestia ?

As far as I know no other global map of Mars can compete with the mine in term of precision and details. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You should try my new 8k mars texture .

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2393

Bye Jens

[the guardian]

Fridger
I have studied a bit of philosiphy I suppose I can be considered that. As for who I am I go on this plane of existance as the guardian. A mere mortal who at times passes on knowledge from the spiritual world.

[t00fri]

Fridger
I have studied a bit of philosiphy I suppose I can be considered that. As for who I am I go on this plane of existance as the guardian. A mere mortal who at times passes on knowledge from the spiritual world.

Aha!;-)

Ever thought about more than 3 space and 1 time dimension?

Bye Fridger

[Guest]

If you refer to looking further than the tip of my nose, yes 8)

[Christophe]

As concerns myself, I only participate in the development of the Celestia code and other things, as long as the projects are OpenSource.

My long experience in joint internet programming has clearly shown that even a /tiny commercial touch/ changes the nature of such projects as well as the attitude of the users towards it /completely/.

And you're still running Suse? Sheesh!

[t00fri]

As concerns myself, I only participate in the development of the Celestia code and other things, as long as the projects are OpenSource.

My long experience in joint internet programming has clearly shown that even a /tiny commercial touch/ changes the nature of such projects as well as the attitude of the users towards it /completely/.

And you're still running Suse? Sheesh!

Well, the part of my statement concerning OpenSource software is clearly independent of SuSE.

But I agree with you, I have very bad feelings to see how the commercial efforts of the major LINUX distributors are /desintegrating/ the Linux community into different mutually incompatible camps! In that sense also the second part of my statement seems correct...

The premise is to make life simpler with Linux for Newbies, the result is total loss of transpaerncy via /endless/ scripts all over the place and many /hundreds/ of distributor specific patches in /standard/ UNIX software that largely destroys the compatibility among different Linux distributions.

It is also revealing to see the change of attitude towards customers of SuSE for example over the years. Every minute of their time is converted into money, users only communicate with anonymous shell scripts, everything is 'automatic'. Progress is just 'beautiful';-)

Developers spend much more time now (hi Christophe) to adapt multi platform code to various LINUX distributions because of this tendency.

I simply hate it but we cannot change it either....

Bye Fridger

[Christophe]

Well, the part of my statement concerning OpenSource software is clearly independent of SuSE.

I just said that because SuSE is said to be one of the 'less free' among commercial Linux distributions (they don't use a free licence for their own developments for example).

But I agree with you, I have very bad feelings to see how the commercial efforts of the major LINUX distributors are /desintegrating/ the Linux community into different mutually incompatible camps! In that sense also the second part of my statement seems correct...
[...]
Developers spend much more time now (hi Christophe) to adapt multi platform code to various LINUX distributions because of this tendency.

I simply hate it but we cannot change it either....

I'm not that pessimistic, sure things are far from perfect but I think things are now converging - maybe because I think that it can't get any worse! X development has more or less stalled for 10 years, then things evolved very fast, it is now time for consolidation and the same thing goes for most components GCC, libc... I think we now have at least 2 years before the next major leap (QT4/KDE4 GTK3?). By the way inclusion of GCC 2.95 in SuSE really is an anachronism.

And who knows, maybe one day the LSB will be comprehensive enough to allow 'standard' RPMS distribution!