Celestia Forums

Hi all,
I hope that the virtual textures can develop to a point where even relatively untechnical people,( like me) can enjoy both looking at and possibly making them. The Blue marble texture is fantastic, in fact the whole thing is a bit addictive, it makes you want to get even closer, where does it stop? Don E says that higher resolutions still, like 64k, don't come cheap or free, that's a pity, but maybe we dont need the whole planet.There is a lot of water thats already averaged isn't there? The 128k pix of the ksc are great too. It doesnt hurt to have the ability to use them if they are available, does it? Couldn't lower resolutions be interpolated to give a higher level of detail, if this was for small areas of special interest?
I really admire the skill and artistic talent of Don Edwards, I think he would have even more fans if we could all see the bigger textures, my computer only seems to go up to 8k without a lot of paging etc. I second the opinions of those already saying don't go; I also think that the German guys can be a bit misunderstood, but undoubtedly any effort I made to communicate in German would be at least ten times worse.
I've tried the Fridgers script, Cygwin and Imagemajick method of creating tiles and am sorry to say that even with the instructions, I was still in trouble.I did get it to work, a bit, but with plenty of frustration at mysterious messages like "-cant find", and ending, hours later with bizarre and scrambled up textures. I also have no means, that I know of, to convert to dds files.Would it be possible to make a single packaged program where you feed in your image at one end and tiles come out the other? This seems to be the way forward, if band width and file size hosting/ downloading issues are to be avoided. It is definitely worth seeing textures in Celestia this way, surely the standards for tile sizes and so on can evolve (or be adjustable, as already suggested), when there is a bit more experience of what works/looks best; there seem to be valid arguments for various technical aspects.
Anyway, I'm hoping for light rather than heat.... thanks to all you guys that can actually get all this stuff going, respect to you all.
regards ziggy.

That would be a great thing, cause I too have trouble to convert jpeg images into .dds files, even with the whole Microsoft directX tools it won't work, and the Plugins for Photoshop seem to be a good thing, but without photoshop, witch isn't very cheep, you can forget them.

Its very frustating too seen the brilliant work presented in the texture forum without any chance of getting something similar..

ziggy wrote:...
I've tried the Fridgers script, Cygwin and Imagemajick method of creating tiles and am sorry to say that even with the instructions, I was still in trouble.I did get it to work, a bit, but with plenty of frustration at mysterious messages like "-cant find", and ending, hours later with bizarre and scrambled up textures.
...
regards ziggy.

You should not have given up so easily. For sure, you did not follow the Cygwin and/or Imagemagick installation instructions /precisely/. If you got an "-cant find..." it just means that some needed tools/programs are not in your execution path! In other words that your execution path has not been set up correctly. Did you perhaps forget to download 'zsh' separately. If you use virtualtex with the 'bash' shell, you must change the first line in the script by hand!

In the cygwin shell, just type

identify <=== important
convert
virtualtex
whoami
zsh

For the first three calls you should get a sensible 'help' output. For the 4th your username and finally, a shell prompt. If you got nonsense or "cant find" then my suspicion was right. By typing

echo $PATH

you can then inspect the execution path and find out which directory is missing.

There is a /postinstall/ script that sets the path in the cygwin installation. If you played some illegal tricks during the cygwin download, it was not executed...you can download it separately and execute it later by hand. And for that you should not use a windows editor but one from cygwin...Remember the problem with different line endings in UNIX and DOS!

Everyone elsewho tried so far has managed to get the stuff
running fine. Come on, have yourself challenged a bit;-)

Bye Fridger

Hi all,
Thank-you Fridger for your advice and words of encouragement. I shall press on with more determination. I have both versions of image -majik - which is the best to use or does it not matter? Do I now need Photo-shop and a Cygwin text editor, and a plug-in for the photo-shop, or can I manage without. I really want this to work, but to my ears this is somewhat like the instructions to make a cup of tea starting with the words..."first find two dry sticks, then rub them briskly together"...
Anyway, I'm gratefull for the help, and I know when things do start to come together, then it seems that it was worth the effort, and you wonder how it was ever difficult
cheers Ziggy

ziggy wrote:Hi all,
Thank-you Fridger for your advice and words of encouragement. I shall press on with more determination. I have both versions of image -majik - which is the best to use or does it not matter? Do I now need Photo-shop and a Cygwin text editor, and a plug-in for the photo-shop, or can I manage without. I really want this to work, but to my ears this is somewhat like the instructions to make a cup of tea starting with the words..."first find two dry sticks, then rub them briskly together"...
Anyway, I'm gratefull for the help, and I know when things do start to come together, then it seems that it was worth the effort, and you wonder how it was ever difficult
cheers Ziggy

Q8 means 8-bit accuracy per color channel = 24bit. For our purposes Q8 is sufficient. So, please deinstall Q16 = 16bit per color channel. Then open a DOS prompt in an arbitrary directory and type 'convert' if you get the help output of convert you have corrrectly installed Q8. Try typing 'identify' as well and see whether you get something reasonable. If convert is not known, its directory location has to be entered in the DOS execution path by hand. Same for 'identify'.

Throughout, I assume that you master the standard Windows operations (Handbook!), like deinstalling, DOS-prompt etc...

Bye Fridger