Celestia Forums

Hi there,
I'm new to Cellestia. I'm a grade 3/4 teacher and I'd like to use Cellestia in my classroom. I'm having a lot of fun with the program so far, but there are no textures included for some of the planetary bodies, such as Earth's moon, and various other planets.

I downloaded the texture file for the moon here:

http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/ ... n16KVT.zip

and decompressed it.

I then copied the "Moon16K VT" folder to the /usr/share/cellestia/textures/medres/ folder.

I then edited the following section of my solarsys.ssc file to include the new texture info:

VirtualTexture
{
ImageDirectory "Moon16K VT"
BaseSplit 0
TileSize 512
TileType "dds"
}



After doing all of this, I still have no textures showing on my Moon, just a plain, white orb.

What am I missing?

It sounds like your installation kit was damaged or incomplete.
Where did you get it?

Celestia does come with textures for the Moon, although they're not extremely high resolution. The Moon's texture image files are
Celestia/textures/lores/moon.jpg (19KB)
and
Celestia/textures/medres/moon.jpg (235KB)

Do those files exist on your computer?

I'd suggest downloading the Celestia installation kit from SourceForge at
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfil ... p_id=21302
Remember to left-click (select) on the link. Don't use right-click save-link-as.

So do you think that I'm installing the textures correctly? Have I completed added the info to my "solarsys.ssc" file properly?

I got my Celestia using the "Add/Remove..." program in Ubuntu, so it'd be the version of Celestia in the repos. I'll try uninstalling/reinstalling. Either way, I'd still like to know how to add higher-res textures to my installation of Cellestia, not to mention all the other cool stuff, so what I'd really like to know is whether you think I've followed the add-on steps correctly.

Also, the sourceforge list you provided doesn't seem to have amd64 builds for Celestia. (I forgot to mention that I'm using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.) I'll try reinstalling it from Synaptic.

****UPDATE****

I've tried reinstalling from Synaptic, with no luck. Still no textures on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupeter, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto.

Earth has texture, as does Sol and Saturn, some of Pluto's moons and the ISS, Hubble, etc. There may be others with texture, but I haven't fully explored yet.

Any ideas?

Please check to see if the moon.jpg textures that are supposed to be in the medres and lores directories actually are.

There have been problems in the past caused by Celestia's executable being built incorrectly. If the moon.jpg textures are in the lores and medres directories, then whoever compiled Celestia did something wrong when building it. You'll need to contact whoever it was and ask them to do it correctly.

Sorry: I didn't answer your question about the VTs.

Celestia's virtual textures have to be specified quite differently from the way you've defined them.

Please take a look at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/brief_vt.html
That may help a little.

selden wrote:Please check to see if the moon.jpg textures that are supposed to be in the medres and lores directories actually are.

The moon.jpg files do not exist in medres or lores directories.


P.S., Celestia is such a cool program it's too bad that there's not a GUI-method for installing add-ons. Has this been discussed before?

disorder wrote:

selden wrote:Please check to see if the moon.jpg textures that are supposed to be in the medres and lores directories actually are.

The moon.jpg files do not exist in medres or lores directories.


P.S., Celestia is such a cool program it's too bad that there's not a GUI-method for installing add-ons. Has this been discussed before?

To get the 16kVT moon textures to work put both the folder that contains the different texture levels and the file Moon16KVT.ctx into celestia's hires texture folder.
Then open up the solarsys.ssc and change it to look like this..


"Moon" "Sol/Earth"
{
Texture "Moon16KVT.ctx"
BumpMap "moonbump.*"
BumpHeight 3.5
Radius 1737.53
# Oblateness 0.002

InfoURL "http://www.nineplanets.org/luna.html"

I take it you are using Ubuntu Intrepid.

On the Ubuntu Intrepid distribution, the majority of the textures have been helpfully bundled into a package called "celestia-common-nonfree" because the Ubuntu package maintainers have problems with the licensing in the majority of cases. Even more helpfully, this package is not automatically installed when you download Celestia by the normal means, nor is it indicated in any way that this package exists during the installation process, so the typical user will just see a "broken" Celestia.

Thanks Ubuntu.

Way to fix it is to go into the terminal and run

An Addon manager has been discussed frequently. There is some hope that something might happen for use with the next major release of Celestia after v1.6. In other words, it'll be at least a year from now.

ajtribick wrote:Way to fix it is to go into the terminal and run

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install celestia-common-nonfree

AH! Perfect! I remembered seeing the common-nonfree package in Synaptic, but seeing as the info for that particular package didn't mention anything about planetary textures, I didn't bother. Now my Moon actually looks like something!

Reiko wrote:To get the 16kVT moon textures to work put both the folder that contains the different texture levels and the file Moon16KVT.ctx into celestia's hires texture folder.
Then open up the solarsys.ssc and change it to look like this..


"Moon" "Sol/Earth"
{
Texture "Moon16KVT.ctx"
BumpMap "moonbump.*"
BumpHeight 3.5
Radius 1737.53
# Oblateness 0.002

Thanks! This appears to have worked, though I'm not sure I can tell the difference yet between the original Moon textures and the new one... I'll try a few other add-ons to see if I've got it right.

selden wrote:An Addon manager has been discussed frequently. There is some hope that something might happen for use with the next major release of Celestia after v1.6. In other words, it'll be at least a year from now.

Hmm... well at least its "in the works"... perhaps in the meantime the phrase "easy to install" should be removed from the following text on the Celestia homepage:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/celestia/index.html wrote:Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

--- edit ---

john Van Vliet wrote:hi disorder ALL of the downloads on the motherload MUST have a README or INSTALL with instructions on installing them
With all VT textures the whole folder goes into /extras then start celestia

I downloaded the addon he provided in the link and it didn't have a readme or an SSC file. Just the textures and the ctx file.
However, the description on the motherlode does say to make an ssc file for it but those instructions were not included in the zip file.

--- edit ---

john Van Vliet wrote:this explains it the /creators/praesepe folder has downloads from 2004 -- before we started enforcing the rules
i better go and let bob know that those are NOT up to par
http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/moon.php

Bob already knows...

Do you want me to delete the offending add-on?

--- edit ---

Or you could download it, add the readme and SSC file then re-upload it. It's a really good mod by the way.

john Van Vliet wrote:no just make sure there is a note , on the description,in big bold unfriendly letters stating that they need to be installed manually .

Done, but without unfriendly text.

--- edit ---

john Van Vliet wrote:"in big bold unfriendly letters stating "
it a take off of the description of the the words " Don't Panic "
those are in BIG friendly letters

Okay, have a look now.
Best I can do at the moment.

--- edit ---