Anonymous wrote:so which format you suggest to use in Celestia? PNG? I have read that the quality of this format is near to DDS, but is a bit bigger of JPG. Right?
PNG has "perfect" quality, i.e. it is identical to the original data. JPG is a bit worse (depends on what quality was selected when saving the JPG), and DDS is worst (quality-wise). The only reason to use DDS is for performance (which is MUCH better).
The qualtiy of JPG is typically good enough so you won't see a difference to PNG, but the files are much smaller. So it's a pretty good choice in most cases, but JPG doesn't have an alpha-layer, which is needed for e.g. clouds. In short: it depends.
And, second question, should I download the textures in original PNG format or converting from DDS to PNG format works fine too?
If the files aren't too big, you should download the PNG or JPG version.
That's because I have already a lot of .DDS textures in an another computer (which can manage DDS but unfortunately is much slower than the other one). Further, I see that much textures of Earth in hi-res are available in DDS format only. So, is conversion a good choice?
Please keep in mind that your graphic card probably won't be able to handle textures with very high resolutions. One 4k texture needs about 25 MB of memory, that's why DDS is used, which only takes 1/6 (?) of this for the same resolution.
But what is exactly "transparent color"? It is a color feature present in every DSS texture or only in specific textures in which is needed some "transparency" (e.g. in clouds maps)?
Hey, you wrote DSS again - it's DDS
The transparency color (or more general the alpha layer) is only used in some textures. It's obviously used in cloud-maps, but it can also be used to mark areas with water in normal textures, so no separate specmap is needed (IIRC the default earth-texture makes use of this).
Harald
