Celestia Forums

Hello !

I'm new with Celestia.
I wanted to change the Earth texture.
I found lot of stuff in this great forum.

I'have some questions:

- I managed to use texture 4096*2048 with my geforce 4
But above, it is too slow : is it really possible to use 8192*4096 or above texture (I have an Athlon 1800 XP with geforce 4)

- What is DDS texture ?
I found the 16k DDS in this forum
How does it work ?

Thank you

Hello zoo_h, im quite new here myself
but i think i can answer a part of your question

I too found some nice dds texture for earth here too, (not sure wht the diference of a dds is)
so just place them into the medres directory

then you have to edit the solasys.scc file, (in the data directory)
go to the section for earth, just a few lines down.
and change the texture from jpg to dds

like this

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "earth.dds"
NightTexture "earth-night.dds"
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
SpecularPower 25.0
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 6378
# Oblateness 0.003

Make sure the name of the dds file and the name of the texture in the ssc file are the same

so if it is earth_16k.dds then type that in to the ssc file

Thank you !

Have you already installed this texture on your computer ?
Isn't it too big to run properly ?

I'll try tonight, after work ...

Yes i have the 16k Eath texture running on my machine
and it runs very well

I have a Pentium 4 1.5ghz
512meg Rambus Ram
and a geforce 2 Gts pro 64meg ddr video card
running latest 30.82 nvidia drivers

see how that compares
And if its dosnt run on your systen try to get the 8k version
its almost as good

Ortolan wrote:As I understand it, DDS textures use the DXT compressed file format, which is 'hardware native', meaning the graphics card doesn't have to decompress it in order to load it into memory. Formats like JPG and PNG must be decompressed into a bitmap for the graphics card to load them. This means a DDS texture will only take up as little as 1/8th the video card memory as a JPG or PNG (even though they are smaller files on disk).

Ortloan posted this in another post
brought it here for you. zoo_h

Hey Guys,
My first question is which GeForce4 card do you have. If you getting any kind of slowdown on a true GeForce4 Ti series card check to make sure you are using the newest drivers. I have a 4200Ti and a 1.13GHz PIII and I don't get any kind of slowdown. Now if you bought one those GeForce4 MX 420's thats your problem right there. It only has SDRAM not DDR and that will definetly cause a slowdown as the textures are loaded into slower reacting RAM.If you have a GeForce4 MX 440-460 you shouldn't see that much of a slowdown either. Another thing to check on is your AGP speed. Make sure your bus is set to 4X instead of 1X or 2X if posible. This will give you a minor speed bump. Another thing to check is your settings for OpenGL Anti-Aliasing. If you have it set to 4X try setting it to Quincunx or 2X. This could speed things up a little too. Or just turn it off if you like. I have mine set to 4X all the time and I don't have a problem. Make sure to check all your OpenGL settings in the NVidia panels of your display properties. Tweaking these can slow you down or speed you up. Don't worry about any Direct3D settings as this has no effect on Celestia as far as I know. You may also check to see if your motherboards chipset manufacturer has updated drivers for you. If you have a Via based motherboard go to Via's website and download there latest 4in1 driver pack for your version of Windows. If you use Linux I can't help any further.

Darkmiss wrote:
...so just place them into the medres directory

then you have to edit the solasys.scc file, (in the data directory)
go to the section for earth, just a few lines down.
and change the texture from jpg to dds

like this

"Earth" "Sol"

Texture "earth.dds"
NightTexture "earth-night.dds"


Make sure the name of the dds file and the name of the texture in the ssc file are the same

so if it is earth_16k.dds then type that in to the ssc file

i got sem same problem, i was happy that someone has an answer for it.
well i tried this, i did exactly what u said, but it doesn't work. what could i do??
i even put them in the 'hires' and the 'lowres' folder, the same problem here. i don't know what to do, can u help me?

The other thing that needs to be set if you happen not to be using a dds file is texture compresion. Your .ssc should have a line added to it.

"Earth" "Sol"
{
Texture "earth.png"
# Texture "earth8k.dds"
NightTexture "landoceanicelights.JPG"
CompressTexture true
Color [ 0.85 0.85 1.0 ]
SpecularColor [ 0.5 0.5 0.55 ]
SpecularPower 25.0
HazeColor [ 1 1 1 ]
HazeDensity 0.3
Radius 6378
# Oblateness 0.003
This will turn on the ability for texture to be compressed on the fly. I will slow down the load up of the texture a little but the results are that you can use bigger textures while having not to worry about .dds files. Personaly because of all textures I make I use this because I don't convert my textures to .dds files.