Celestia Forums

Hi everyone! Yesterday night (long, long night) I discovered Celestia and still I'm thinking if this is a dream...

I ask for your help in a moon huge texture (11520 x 5760) that I cannot see (only see a white sphere instead of texture).

What is supossed I'm doing wrong?

I have copied this file in all possible combinations in the three directories (hires, medres, lores). Where should I put this file? Should I modify solarsys.ssc?

My computer (I think&hope) should be powerful enough to work with this texture : AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz / 256 Mb RAM, 100 of them free, all drivers and software up to date ...

Any advice PLEASE?

Alberto, Spain

Hi Alberto,

The texture height and width should be powers of two, so if you scale it down to 8192 x 4096 it might work, although it is probably neccesary to convert it to a dds-file. This has already been done by others, see http://ennui.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=889 Try the moon-8k dds!

Welcome to Celestia, Alberto.
this is a very nice community here, Welcome aboard.

Try this thread for some nice large textures, mostly in .DDS format
which will only work with an Nvidia Gforce 2 or above video card.

http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5328#5328

post up what kind of computer spec you have, for us to understand.
and any other questions you may have, and we will be glad to help


Have a look at the link to my gallery below, to see what some of these textures look like.

Okay a couple more things

A .dds texture is just like a .jpg or .bmp
but is supercompressed and uncompres faster than a .jpg
thats why all the best textures are in .dds format

to use a .dds file you have to edit the solarsys.ssc file with a text editor.

put the .dds file into the medres directory with the same name as the texture you want to replace. eg: earth.jpg - earth.dds

then edit the soslarsys.ssc file and find earth settings,
and just change the earth texture to say earth.dds instead of earth .jpg

One last thing, before you get too far into setting up celesetia,
you might want to install this version http://www.shatters.net/celestia/files/celestia-win32-1.2.5pre7.exe
It is the latest pre release, and has a ton more features, comet tails,ring shadows, bug fixes, and lots more.
Enjoy.

Thank you for your answers! I'll try to resize, but don't think a dds file is going to work because I don't have Nvidia Gforce 2 or above video card (hummm ) I've only got a S3 Twister K with 16Mb video memory. (I'm afraid that Celestia will spend my money in a near future...)

Neverthless, the question that I need your support is where to put different level of textures : hires, medres or lores carpets?

Thanks again in advance!!
Alberto, Madrid, Spain

Sorry for the bitter dose of reality but i'm afraid a texture that big won't work (properly) on your video card. You should avoid textures bigger than your VC memory (a bit less actually) or frame rate will slow down to a crawl.

Regarding texture folders: you could start copying the texture to the hires and editting the solarsys.ssc (Moon section).

Alberto,

The different folders are most useful when you have several different versions of the same texture map with the same name.

Celestia uses the image file name that is in /data/solarsys.ssc
You have to edit solarsys.ssc if you want to use a different image type.

If files with the same name is in all three folders, Celestia uses the texture file that is in "medres". You then use r and Shift-R to select textures that are in the higher and lower resoution folders than the one you are currently viewing.

If you only want to use one texture, the medres folder is fine.

I hope this helps.