Celestia Forums

Does anyone have what would basically be an oceanic texture, no land, with or without ice caps?

The one I am using I converted from a 2k Earth map, but the oceans are simply too dark. Here is the standard texture that I use for oceans:



Minus the small land areas, of course. I suppose it could simply be an artifact of my video card, an Nvidia TNT2 32mb, which I think is not working properly with my system.

Still, if anyone has a better "blank" map like this, I'd love to know, and possibly use with permission. I've tried lightening the above texture via photoshop and PSP, but everything I try simply makes it look worse in one way or another.

Thanks...

...John, working on 36+ hours with no sleep...

I think a (water-)ocean world would be this dark anyway. The main effect on brightness is shurely specularity - that's also (beside of cloud effects) why our real earth looks so pale blue. If your card doesn't support specular effects, this is probably the main culprit.

maxim

Hi Maxim...

Hmm, you're probably right. Speculars, bump maps, ring shadows, none of that I can see.

Thanks! I'll probably jsut stick with that map, then.

...John...

You are lucky John; at least you can see night textures...

You can't see night textures, Steve? I thought you just couldn't see speculars and bumps.... gads, that stinks....

Time for a video card upgrade, maybe?

I'm not being facetious here - what was high end a few months ago is quite probably going for quite cheap today... OK, such a card is probably on the verge of being phased out, but still, it can't cost more than $50 can it? (of course, if money is tight then that's not an option anyway )

Yeah, depending on the system that you are running, a new card may or may not do anything. The Nvidia card I use in my other machine, for instance (the one that has all of my various installations of Celestia on it), refuses to work in the computer I am using right now (which is the only one that is hooked up to the 'Net). This ol' Gateway, which isn't THAT old, won't even start up if you try to install it.

I know I am looking for a new card... but then I'm also looking for a new motherboard, new RAM, new everything.

But... thats probably going to be shelved for a while, now that we decided to get carpet and, in a couple of months, new furniture. Ah, prioroties....

...John...

Oh yeah, here's what your texture looks like on my PC, with OGL/NVIDIA Combiner paths...



I plonked it around Alpha Centauri A. I think it's the haze, but if you look at the side illuminated by B you can see some odd effects (see below)... might be my video card though.



See the "black clouds" on the bottom right of the planet? (I think I might post this on the Bugs board actually).

Surprisingly, pricing for the low end of the "full function cards" hasn't gone down at all in the past few months. For example, online prices of the FX5200 are still $50-$100 U.S. depending on features like fans and game packages.

Odds are, it is my texture. I'm not the best texture maker at this stage of the game, and I tend to get hurried in the face of the number of systems that I want to do before I settle down and start really going over these systems (something I'll probablys tart discussing on the ArcBuilder List in a few days).

It DOES look kind of nice with the specular shine to it, though. Ah, to dream.....

...John...

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:...I plonked it around Alpha Centauri A. I think it's the haze, but if you look at the side illuminated by B you can see some odd 'blocky pixel' effects... might be my video card though.

I seem to get most, if not all the Celestia eye-candy with my otherwise mediocre FX 5200, which I managed to buy for ?60 UK.

I wish I'd waited and bought a better one, for other reasons, but if eye-candy is your major bag, its a way to go.

Cormoran

Comoran,

Yes, the 5200 shows all of the eye candy that's available in v1.3.2 and in v1.4.0.

Chris has mentioned some future enhancements that he's been thinking about for a version of Celestia after v1.4.0 that would require features currently available only in Nvidia's 6000 series of cards. My guess is that those features won't actually appear for another 6 months to a year, by which time that functionality will be available from other vendors, too.

Dollan wrote:Odds are, it is my texture. I'm not the best texture maker at this stage of the game, and I tend to get hurried in the face of the number of systems that I want to do before I settle down and start really going over these systems (something I'll probablys tart discussing on the ArcBuilder List in a few days).

It's definitely not your texture - I was using the Earth cloud map, and when I switched that off, the "black clouds" (they weren't blocky pixels after all) disappered. Seems to be something to do with the interaction between haze and cloudmaps, I think.

It DOES look kind of nice with the specular shine to it, though. Ah, to dream....

I figured you'd want to see what it looked like with that, which is why I posted the pictures .

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:...I figured you'd want to see what it looked like with that, which is why I posted the pictures .

Much appreciation!

The computer I use down at my Night job is so pitiful that I can't even run Celestia in any meaningful form, but I'm hoping I can convince the school to put a university computer in the office. I KNOW thay have good systems, and hopefully I can get the rights to install programs on it. If THAT happens....

Shouldn't be a problem, I'm in that office more than anyone in the building, so....

...John...

Dollan,
I think I can explain why your replacement video card will not work on your present motherboard. Your present motherboard probably only supports up to AGP 2. It could be that the newer card is AGP 4 or the non to mentioned AGP 3. AGP 3 was not a true official model but there were some AGP 2 cards that wound up only working in a 4x slot wile other were still backward compaible. You may have one of these transitional AGP 2 cards or it is a true AGP 4 card. Either way you are looking at upgrading your motherboard to get that new card to work. The only other option is to see if there may be a bios update for your motherboard that may let your card work. If after the update the system still will not boot with the card than you will be needing that update. Hope this helps. Now as for the motherboard upgrade make sure you get one that cand support AGP 8x. This will still allow you to upgrade to the present generation of cards before we are all forced to upgrade to PCI Expres video cards. I myself am looking at this upgrad path in about 6 months.

Don. Edwards

I am sanguine about the poor performance of my video card at the moment; in a few years no doubt we will get a better machine in our house, (especially if the kids get their way)
and thanks to Moore's Law it will probably have more or less everything I currently want; but by that time no doubt the Celestia program and the required graphics will have developed even further.

The planets in the Orion's arm universe addons are supposed to be low resolution images of the many worlds (more than three hundred so far) in our imagined universe;
already I have some better versions of the existing planets nearly ready to go onto the Motherlode, and any of the collaborators on our site can make hi-res versions if they feel moved to do so.
However the main purpose of the addons at the moment are to link to the worldbook entries on our site, rather than to display our modelling skills. With time and luck there will be better images for each of the planets in our imagined universe, both old and new.