Idea: Texture Packs

[Sum0]

OK, for Earth there's a 16k texture. Then there's 4k clouds, 8k specular maps, 8k bump maps, 8k night maps... and then there's the texture and bump map for the moon. It's a lot to find and download, and just for one planet and it's moon. So why not get all the best DDS textures for any planet, and put them in a zip along with the necessary .ssc changes? It would make life much easier for the newbie... especially with Jupiter and it's moons.

[Don. Edwards]

Sum0,
People have done this in the past. Look at all of Rassilon's addons. No one has taken the time to do it because #1 the file would be quite large and alot of people do not have a broadband conection to download a large textue package. Thats why all the really big textures 8k and 16k are always by themselves. I am working on a 16k version of the Earth texture I made and it going to be available all by itself as well. For me to put all the versions of my Earth textures together makes for quite a big upload that takes a great deal of time to complete. I would rather break everything down onto managible parts the right size for everyone to download. Its just my opinion though. But its also the main reason Chris doesn't include any of the high end textures with Celestia. It would bloat the download to probably close to 30mb or more. I can see everyone just complaining for a smaller version then. But then you could always put everything together and try it to see how it would work.
Don.

[bh]

I have to agree with Don. I only have a 56k modem and the last big texture download I did was Rassilon's NGC1999 nebula. This took nearly five hours! with two dropped connections. My moden is at 28kps as I'm writing this. Gasp!

[Don. Edwards]

bh,
Don't you just love when those pesky 56k modems won't at least conect at a decent rate like at least 49k. God I hope I never have to go back to a 56k modem. Broadband definetly spoils one to the speed.
Don

[rickindy]

I think the texture pakcs are a good idea, but I can see that not everyone would want to wait for a huge download of a 16k texture.
How about texture packs based on resolution e.g. earth2k, mars8k, etc?
That way, people who didnt need or want the large textures wouldn't have to wait for the download.
It would be a great help for newbies to put the various sizes in different packs and tell them what the differences are.

[Sum0]

OK, maybe the zip wasn't a good idea, but I still think we should have all the textures (separately) in one place. Something like t00fri's Texture Foundry (apologies if it isn't t00fri ), but with different pages for each planet. Maybe i'll do it myself...

[t00fri]

OK, maybe the zip wasn't a good idea, but I still think we should have all the textures (separately) in one place. Something like t00fri's Texture Foundry (apologies if it isn't t00fri :)), but with different pages for each planet. Maybe i'll do it myself...

Yes it is my Texture Foundry. But why do you want me to introduce different pages for the planets? Because people are unable to read the file names before downloading?;-)

Bye Fridger

[Sum0]

Just a matter of organisation. If you get a lot of textures it'll be harder to go through the list picking the ones you want.

[t00fri]

Just a matter of organisation. If you get a lot of textures it'll be harder to go through the list picking the ones you want.

Put differently: why should I spend a weekend coding some luxus for people unable/unwilling to read texture file names before downloading??

I prefer to spend my available time on improving the textures or the code of Celestia...

But you are welcome to provide the html/cgi code such that everything works automatically with planet subdirectories when I dump a new texture into the archive;-)

Bye Fridger

[John Van Vliet]

I have a all in one for Mercury but in .png and the largest image is 8k ,
and it weighs in at a hefty 73.5 meg. tarball
I can put more large packiges up but if they are not downloaded then they just take up disk space .