Wow amazing!

[Smirnov]

Been playing with this program for about 4 hours now.

Absolutely amazing, congratulations to Chris for such a peice of software!

Just been hunting around for some hi-res textures, grabbed the Earth, Moon and Mars ones that Chris posted the other day. All great stuff, if only there were hi-res cloud and night textures for Earth though!

One sujestion would be a single place where you can download textures from, I've noted Ivan Rivera's site, but seems to be lacking texture wise. Obviously space for them is a problem, I can help out space wise if space is a problem. My FTP is ftp.dasmirnov.net (annoymous logon). Bandwidth is capped at 8KB/s but I can bung that up to 32KB/s if needed. If anyone wants to upload any hi-res textures they've done or whatever (created a dir in uploads, "Celestia textures"), you're more then welcome. Save me downloading.

How long before we have a complete "Known Universe Simulator"?

OK I'm off to try and make some movies of the Earth spinning away in the blackness of space viewed from the Moon.

-Paul.

[Pixel]

It is good idea to have common place to share big-file artworks.
I have full collection of 8192x4096 earth textures :
- base texture with alpha for specular lighting (43Mb dxt3-dds file),
- true-color nightligths with eliminated ambient reflections (21 MB dxt1-dss file)
- hi-res clouds (27Mb png file). Unfortunatelly the maximum working dds size for clouds texture were 2K , but for my suprize they are still working with a big 8k png file. ( 1min load time )

I am on GeForce2 Ti 64Mb, and all of these are rendered together verry smoothly if once loaded in Celestia (a few second).
May be there are many ppl, at least Fridger that want to share their creations too.
I may start uploading tonight.

Regards,
Pxl.

[bruckner]

Hi, Paul. I have no problems to post huge textures in my site; it's only that none of the authors asked me to do so. I've heard in this group about compressed textures for GeForce and similarly advanced cards, but I've failed to find more links apart of those provided by Chris.

In theory I have a bandwidth of 16 kB/s available for downloads, but my ISP lowers that value arbitrarily (and randomly, as it seems). No disk space problems, though.

The more mirrors, the better... If you find any more big resolution textures and want to host them on your ftp, tell me so I can add a link to them at my add-ons page; I'd be willing to mirror them, also.

Best regards.

Bruckner (Iv?n's alter ego)

[Smirnov]

Well I'd be willing to help out.

I'll keep an eye out for any hi-res textures, I've put up the textures that Chris posted last month.

ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/

I've named them using the following format: <name of object>_<resolution (width)>_<file type>.zip just to make things a bit clearer.

[t00fri]

May be there are many ppl, at least Fridger that want to share their creations too.
I may start uploading tonight.

Regards,
Pxl.

Indeed I have quite an amazing collection of *.dds etc textures. Unfortunately these files are very large and from my home machine where I have thoses files I am only connected by a regular modem which is far too slow. In the office I do have a fast ethernet connection, of course. From time to time I may just transport those huge files by means of a HP-DAT tape from my home to the office...

Unfortunately, also my WEBspace is entirely reserved for professional matters.

Fridger

[bruckner]

Hi, Fridger!

I'm sure your textures are worth the effort, so I propose you some solutions:

a) If you have a CD writer, take a CD-R and dump them there, then mail the CD to someone willing to put them up. ("Someone" might be me, as well...)

b) Zip your textures and split them up via a file splitting program. There are plenty of freeware ones for all platforms (on Linux, just use the split command). Then send them by e-mail, one at a time. I reconnect them and put them up for everybody to download.

a) requires some effort, but in the end it should be quicker. b) is slower, but virtually without costs. Suppose your zipped textures take 8 MB, and you have a 56k modem. Then, if you split them in 1 MB chunks, each chunk will take 1024 KB / 3 KB/s (usual upload throughput for a 56k modem connection) = 6 min approx. That's 40 min worth of sending mail (I'll receive it much quicker, I'm on a 256 Kbps DSL), and you could distribute in several days, if you wished to. After two weeks you'd have everything uploaded. If you decide a) is a good answer, I'd give you my postal address, but bear in mind that I live in Spain and it's probably cheaper for you to contact someone nearer your own place...

There might be other ways, so don't let narrow bandwidth stop you from sharing your creativity with the world

Best regards.

Bruckner

[Pixel]

Well I'd be willing to help out.

I'll keep an eye out for any hi-res textures, I've put up the textures that Chris posted last month.

ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/

I've named them using the following format: <name of object>_<resolution (width)>_<file type>.zip just to make things a bit clearer.

I still have no permission to write there.

[t00fri]

Hi Bruckner,

thanks for your proposals for transmision. I know pretty well what can be done, this is not the problem. I do have a high-speed SCSI HP-DAT drive both at home and in my machine in the office that can read/write with 500KB/sec. What I need is a high speed receiver URL, since from the office I do not want to remain busy for a long time with dumping the stuff (like 8Kb/sec or so;-)). This would cut my urgently needed bandwidth too much over the day.

So should I write the files to your site? How precisely do you want it?
My ethernet in the office operates with 1MB/sec under ssh and with 5MB/sec with ftp, all depending of course on the other side...

Bye Fridger

[bruckner]

No way I could receive data at that speed! I'm on a simple DSL (256kbps for the downlink). An 8MB file would take slightly more than 5 min to pass through the narrow end of the link. I have a much better connection at work, but it's firewalled to death and I can't open you an uplink ftp.

Of course, that means you wouldn't be using all of your bandwidth to upload, and there should be no problems using the rest for other tasks, at least in most setups. If you want, I can open an anonymous ftp upload access. Other volunteers may step in, of course...

Best regards.

Bruckner

[Guest]

Of course, that means you wouldn't be using all of your bandwidth to upload, and there should be no problems using the rest for other tasks, at least in most setups. If you want, I can open an anonymous ftp upload access. Other volunteers may step in, of course...

Best regards.

Bruckner

Altogether I had a look, I have ~120 MB of *.dds textures that may be further compressed by about a factor of 3. Each 8k DXT1 is about 22MB without further gziping. The 4K DXT3 are about 11MB.

Now in a short while there may well be a number of similar files around produced by various people. Also in my case I have different variations for the same object. Therefore a brief, but concise description what filters have been applied, what kind of alpha channel etc is quite crucial. People should know /before/ starting to download...

Therefore in a pure ftp dump one might just add a short explanatory text file for each *.dds. Your http hub is nicer, of course, since the descriptions may be easily read/browsed beforehand. However then you have to do some work, too.

How should we proceed? Can you store so many MB?
How do I get my files to you?
Anonymous ftp? Ssh? Whats the address?

Also it is quite crucial to have the medres files as dds files as well, using the same name in solarsys.ssc as the respective hires textures.

Bye

Fridger

[Smirnov]

Pixel write into the "/upload/celestia texture/" folder. Should have no problems with that.

I'll copy files across into the final dir when I see some stuff up there.

I've upped bandwidth to 16KB/s too. Just don't start doing stuff when I'm playing Quake III Arena guys. ;)

[Smirnov]

Fridger...

If you need to get the files up somewhere fast. I can put my server to recieve them at about 64KB/s. About 16 seconds per MB.

If we say username: celestia and password: uploads.

I'll set it up to allow anyone with this logon full bandwidth (unless I need some), and full access to "ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/"

OK this is now setup and ready!

[t00fri]

I have just sent Bruckner per email 16 jpegs of 1280x960 size, illustrating some typical features of the various DXTn textures I made.

Perhaps he likes to post them on his site (don't know yet;-)) so people could get an idea /before/ downloading those very long files (after they have arrived there one day;-)...)

Bye Fridger

[bruckner]

Go have a look at http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia.html...

[Smirnov]

Now those are nice!

[t00fri]

Go have a look at http://bruckner.homelinux.net/celestia.html...

Hey Bruckner,

thanks for the care you put into arranging my images in your site!

This way, they should also act as an excellent motivation for newcommers to Celestia, to get to know more about this amazing program...

I just love how you arranged everything and I must confess myself:

Smirnovs headline of this treat fits perfectly:

Wow amazing;-)

In fact, even with my 33k modem the download of individual images is quite fast.

I shall try to pack those texture files today onto a DAT tape such that they can be sent somewhen tomorrow from my office to Bruckner's site.

Bye

Fridger

[bruckner]

A good job deserves to be well framed... There are two essential tools for this framing, however:

1) Website META Language, a Unix toolkit for offline templating of web pages (the pages can even be coded in Perl, but I just use HTML macro expansion among other things). Look for more here: http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/
2) Imagemagick toolset for command line, batch creation of optimized thumbnails: http://www.imagemagick.org/.

And the rest is history

Regards.

Bruckner

[Pixel]

Now it is really amazing! I am running 16384 x 8192 earth and mars textures ( dxt1 compressed) at a rate of 20-60 fps. Not bad, consider my low-cost GeForce2 64MB card. It was quite strange that i was not able to load such a texture in any of known to me image viewers ('not enoght memory' they are saying ). I am not using photoShop. So Celestia appear to me as the only program that alowed me to se these thextures in their full glory .
Don't forget to check the screenshots:
ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/upload/Celestia%20textures/pixel/Gallery16k.zip

[Pixel]

OK. the 2.5MB 16K gallery is here now:

ftp://ftp.dasmirnov.net/astronomy/celestia/textures/pixel/Gallery16k.zip

[Buzz]

Hi Pixel,

This looks absolutely stunning! I'll see what my 32 MB will do...