Celestia Forums

I am new to celestia. How do I go about getting a new texture for mars? Do I have to download a Jpg. and dds.? Will I need a new
bump map?
Also I need some directions to installing these.

Thanks

Please take a look at the Web page
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html
and let me know if it helps.

guest wrote:I am new to celestia. How do I go about getting a new texture for mars? Do I have to download a Jpg. and dds.? Will I need a new
bump map?
Also I need some directions to installing these.

Thanks

Why do you make nice people like Selden always repeat the same instructions, instead of just using the powerful search engine among the 15862 (!) mails. This has nothing to do with specific Celestia experience. Same technique as exploiting the WEB...

Just to query your common sense: what do you guess how often your questions have been asked already among those 15862 mails?

Bye Fridger

Bloody hell fridger what side of the bed you been getting out of latley

how many more people you gonna scare off

Selden, I looked at it but it did not really help. I already tried
a few times to change the texture. I substituted the new images
from the old ones. all I got was a pink ball. I was hoping if you had the time you could get a little more specfic.

Darkmiss,
Fridger has been stepping on allot of feet lately. He has made a comment or two trying to get a rise out of me I feel. I just have learned that he must be going through a certain period in his life where he is being very abrasive. Just let him go off and do his own thing.
These kinds of responses are there very reason I feel the forum needs a dedicated Beginners section.

To Guest,
As always you probably should go ahead and register in the forum. That way we at least will be able to respond directly to your questions. It always helps to know what video card you are using. That is the first place to start. Than we will know from the beginning if you can even use certain sizes and kinds of textures. It is a little difficult to walk you through trying to get something to work and not even know if you video card can to the rendering job. Hope this helps and hope to hear from you in the future.

Don.

Unfortunately Celestia doesn't provide much help when things go wrong.

A pink ball means that no surface texture is being loaded.

If the texture file isn't being loaded, there could be a problem either in solarsys.ssc or with the image file.

[added later: or as Don says, perhaps the file is just too big for your card or your card can't display that image format. Only current model cards can display DDS format.]

A crosshatch (#) in solarsys.ssc (or in any catalog file, for that matter) means "ignore the rest of this line". Make sure there is no # in front of the Texture declaration you want. There must be only one active Texture declaration for each planet definition: make sure there is a # in front of every other Mars Texture definition that you've left in.

Check to make sure you have not made a typographical error in the Texture file name. It must be enclosed in quotes (").

If it is a problem with the image file itself, most likely it is either the wrong format or the wrong size.

Make sure that the image really is what you think it is: JPG, PNG or DDS. The filetype extension of the file name must be correct for the type of flie that it is.

Make sure that the image size is a power of two on a side: 1024x512 for example.

These are all the standard problems people have.
If none of these apply, then you will have to provide the full details of what you've done:

Copy-and-paste the text of your entire Mars definition and post it. Tell us exactly the name and size (width and height) of the image you're trying to use and where you got it. Include the name of the directory where you've put it.

Thanks for your help. I don't have the best graphics card in the
world. See below.

Vendor Intel
Renderer: intel81x
Version: 1.1.0 - Build 4.11.01. 1361
Max simultaneous textures: 1
Max texture sizw 1024

Supported Extensions:
GL_EXT_abgr
GL_EXT_bgra
GL_EXT_packed_pixels
GL_EXT_paletted_texture
GL_SGI_compiled_vertex_array
GL_SGI_cull_vertex
GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array
GL_EXT_cull_vertex
GL_WIN_swap_hint


Here is hteh ssc.
"Mars" "Sol"
{
Texture "mars.jpg"
# Texture "mars8k.dds"
BumpMap "marsbump1k.jpg"
BumpHeight 2.5
Color [ 1 0.75 0.7 ]
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.45
Radius 3394
# Oblateness 0.006

Atmosphere {

Height 30
Lower [ 0.8 0.6 0.6 ]
Upper [ 0.7 0.3 0.3 ]
Sky [ 0.83 0.75 0.65 ]
CloudHeight 10
CloudSpeed 65
CloudMap "mars-clouds.png"
}

CustomOrbit "vsop87-mars"
EllipticalOrbit
{
Period 1.8809
SemiMajorAxis 1.5237
Eccentricity 0.0934
Inclination 1.8506
AscendingNode 49.479
LongOfPericenter 336.041
MeanLongitude 355.453
}

RotationPeriod 24.622962
Obliquity 26.72
EquatorAscendingNode 82.91
RotationOffset 136.005

Albedo 0.150


As far as the image goes i downloaded it a few days ago
All I remember is the it is a medium res almost a meg in size.
Even with my primitive card I can still enjoy many parts of
Celestia. Hopefully I can put the new mars image in. If not
thanks for your help Selden.

P.S. If there ia a moderator to this forum they might consider
giving Fridger a good talking to. I've read several of the messages
on this forum and he always seems to be in a bad mood.

a) As best I can tell (although Don Edwards probably can say for sure) Intel 81x graphics chips can't display DDS texture files at all. Don't waste your time trying to use DDS surface textures.

b) the largest jpeg or png texture you'll be able to display is determined by how much graphics memory is available at the time Celestia tries to load it.

What matters is not how large the on-disk file is but what the resolution of the image is. A "4K" surface texture file is an image that's 4096x2048 pixels. It requires somewhat more than 4196x2048x3 bytes of graphics memory. That's 24 MegaBytes. The 81x chipset can only have a maximum of 8MB of graphics memory, and your system may not have even that much. From what I've found on the Web, many 81x systems only have 4MB, although sometimes they can be upgraded to 8MB with an optional 4MB plugin board.

In other words, the largest texture you might be able to use is a "2K" texture, which is 2048x1024x3 or about 6MB. And that's only if you make sure that you're using the lores surface textures for everything else. (i.e. rename the "medres" folder to something else so Celestia can't find it.)

I hope this clarifies things a little.

selden wrote:a) As best I can tell (although Don Edwards probably can say for sure) Intel 81x graphics chips can't display DDS texture files at all. Don't waste your time trying to use DDS surface textures.

b) the largest jpeg or png texture you'll be able to display is determined by how much graphics memory is available at the time Celestia tries to load it.

I think that the Intel 81x graphics chipsets use a unified memory architecture i.e. textures and frame buffer are stored in system memory. So, texture size may not be a huge limitation--rendering speed, however, will be lackluster compared to even a low-end GeForce or Radeon card. If your computer has an AGP slot, you'll be much happier with Celestia (and any games you might play) if you spend $40-50 to upgrade your graphics.

--Chris

Hey Chris and Everyone,
The Intel chipset does use system memory for the graphics framebuffer. But all manufactures set the maximum buffer size in the bios. Some set it to 2megs and some to 4megs. There are a few that I have seen that set it to 6 or 8megs but those are few and far between. The Intel 810 chipset was disigned for low end systems so the graphics ended up getting lowest priority. This also means you probably only have a few PCI slots. So what you will be needing to look for would be a PCI GeForce2 video card as a minimum. This type of card can be found for as low as $30 dollars if you look around real good. Trust us on this, you will be most pleased with this video card and how Celestia looks.

Don.

I did not know those cards were that inexpensive. I look into
getting one. I just have one last question. If I get the new
graphics card will It be able to show the bumpmapping?
Right now the planets look as falt as a board.

Thanks to everyone for answering my questions