Celestia Forums

I've made several sttempts at installing the "32k Virtual Earth Textures for Celestia" addon pack, but it wont work.

http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/earth-vt/

I followed the directions specifically and it turns the entire earth pure white:

All textures (except clouds) should be extracted to the extras-directory, or a directory in the extras-directory. The ground-texture includes a .ssc-file which provides an AlternateTexture-Defintion for the complete set. If you haven't downloaded all textures, you should comment out the lines referring to those texture you don't have. To activate the textures, right click and select e.g. "e;Earth 32k Normalmap+Nightlights+Spec"e;
The cloud-texture must be in one of the default texture-directories, i.e. you should extract the file to the main Celestia-directory, so that the data is extracted to the textures/medres/ directory. Then change the CloudSpeed for Earth from "CloudSpeed 65" to "CloudSpeed 0" in data\solarsys.ssc (line 99).

There's nothing in those instructions that I didnt do. The zips actually installed the clouds into the hires folder. Tried that. Moved the folder to medres. Moved the level~ folders directly into the medres folder. Redundantly pasted the related ctx files into textures, medres, etc.

The other addon maps I placed into extras as instructed. No good. It had extracted them into a "textures" subfolder. So I even copied the folders directly into the extras. Etc. The first Celestia install I tried this pack on I didn't go the redundant route. This time I reinstalled Celestia and then went ahead and copied the files/folders instead of moving them... just in case.

So now I have the clouds folders pasted into hires, medres, extras, etc. And I'm talking the initial extracted folder contains the level~ subfolders, and the subfolders directly in there. And so on...

The same can be said of the other extracts; I have them directly under extras, and then in extras/medres AND extras/highres. I've put them everywhere I could fathom Celestia possibly looking for them. No Dice.

Nothing seems to work for me. The 'normal' view still works, so I cant see it being some major Celstia internal error.

IIB,

A white globe means that Celestia cannot find the surface texture image files.

Unfortunately, Harold is no longer actively involved with Celestia, so I don't think he'll be providing any help. A quick glance at the Web page shows that he left a lot out of his instructions, evidently assuming that the person installing the Addon would be very familiar with how Celestia uses Virtual Textures.

I've written a very simplified description of how to install unstructured VTs. Please take a look at it to see if it helps in your situation.
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/brief_vt.html

hi IIB in the beginning some of us - me included - were lazy in packaging our vt's
and left out the documentation the readme.txt file and the .ctx file in my case
a prime example is my earth vt
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creat ... _0_1_2.zip
it must be pasted into
/textures/hires or /exteas/textures
then the .ctx needs to be dl'd
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creat ... rthCTX.zip
and pasted into /textures/hires or /extras
then the solarsys.ssc needs to be edited
by changing "earth.* " to " Earth.ctx"
a pain in the but isn't it
-----
new ones like my Earth Night texture are fixed
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creat ... _L0123.zip
they only need to be unzipped in to the Celestia directory and have a readme .txt file