Basic Texture Swapping Question

[Jeff]

I downloaded this program over the weekend and absolutely love it.

However, I'm having a little problem getting Celestia to use higher resolution textures that I've downloaded off the net. I think it boils down to me not understanding the relationship between low, medium, and high res texture folders.

It seems like its always using textures from the lowres folder, so I'm not sure where the other two folders come into play. I've tried swapping out the textures in the lowres folders for the higher resolution textures that I'd like to use, but the planet usually ends up looking like a white globe (Neptune and Europa like to do this).

It could be that I'm missing something obvious, but any help at all would be appreciated. How should I swap the default Celestia textures with these higher resolution textures?

Thanks in advance!

[Troy]

I'm new to Celestia myself, so I may be wrong.

Generaly you should place your textures in the medres directory. I noticed that some textures ( like the rings of Saturn ) are located in lowres, so I think it tries medres first and then, if it doesn't find the texture, it tries lowres.

Next, be sure you're using the exact same filename that the original texture was. Actually, you can use a different name, but then you have to go and edit the configure files ( The .ssc files ).

Finally, make sure your new texture's size is a power of 2. Here are some examples:

512 x 256
1024 x 512
2048 x 1024
1024 x 1024
2048 x 64

All those are legal sizes. Some examples of bad sizes are:

500 x 300
713 x 912
44 x 653

If the texture you want to use isn't the right size ( the white blob you mention sounds like this might be the case ), you'll need to edit the texture. You can do this in Photoshop if you can afford it, or the Gimp, which is free. I'm sure there are other programs that can do this, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Hope this helps.

[Sum0]

Also remember that old Voodoo cards ( 1 & 2, not sure about the others) can't display textures larger than 512x512 or something.

[Smirnov]

The Voodoo cards from 1-3 couldn't draw textures larger then 256x256, it had to cut them down first, obviously losing quality.

[Jeff]

The picture resolution was the problem. I converted it to 2048 x 1024 and now it works fine. Thanks for the advice