Celestia Forums

Celestia freezes up when I try to view earth on the standard high res. 1.2.4 download. However if I turn the texture off for the earth it works fine. I found that the low res. map works fine but I was wondering if there was a way that I could use the low res. map of earth on the high res. standard download?

I see no reason that a lier should not make a great general. A.Lincoln

You could try (as a last resort) manually resizing the file, but you'd have to convert it to an editable file and then convert it back when your done.

The other thing is your not telling us how big a texture your trying to use.
How about telling us how much video ram you have. You may have to turn on texture compession as well. Check out the Help for beginer section of this topic for the needed entry into your .ssc file.

I have a ATI RAGE 128 VR AGP, with an 88AGP/PCI-8/16,NVIDIA TNT 2VANTA LT/VANTA video enhancing chip.

Well I see what part of your problem is. The Rage 128 Isn't going to be very fast at OpenGL rendering like this. Its an ok chip for a starter system but not for trying to crunch big textures like you want to do. The TNT2 Vanta is a major bottle-neck in itself. Number one its a nutered TNT2 chipset with only a mere 64bit memory bandwigth. Plus on top of that its a PCI card. This card is totaly out of reach for using any of the large textures. Its to slow and its in a slow bus. So for now your stuck with the smaller textures until you can at least get yourself a up to date AGP video card. If you have the means I strongly recomend at least a GeForce2 MX200 with 32MB of VRAM. I had one of these and it had no problem with textures up to 2048x1024 or a simgle layered 4096x2048 texture. With this card you can also take advantage of bumpmaping or Spectural lighting effect on water. If you hunt around you can get one of these cards for about $45 US. Posibly even cheaper online. Or you can move up to a newer ATI Radeon based card but you still won't get any spectural lighting effects. I know this almost as fact because I put up a chalenge to all the sites ATI Radeon card owners to prove me wrong and as of yet my claim still stands. No spectural lighting effects with any Radeon based card YET!!
Good Luck and I hope I haven't completly blown your hopes out the window.

Thank you for that insight into how worthless my machine is, But how do I move the "earth.png" from the low res. download, over on to the high res. .ssc file? They are both named to the same in their respected downloads.
One more quick question while I still have you here, just under the "earth.png" there is "earth8k.dds" however is turned off. Is this file in the download and can it be turned on? I have tried turning off the .png, and turning on the .dds but all I get is a gray monotone sphere for earth.

Simply rename the larger earth.png earth2.png or something like that and copy the smaller texture into the medres dir. Now when you load Celestia it should load your smaller texture instead. As for the earth.dds file it is not included and I believe it was left in there so when you did down load one of the larger earth.dds files you could se how to plug it in.
Hope that helps and I didn't mean for you to think I totaly poopooing on your machine. Good luck.