Orbiter sim -any compatabilty with Celestia?

[ziggy]

Hi all,
I've been trying out Orbiter, the programme has some similarities with Celestia, there are some good features and tools. I was wondering if anyone here likes it and whether there are any features that could be used in Celestia too, obviously without infringing anything that should'nt be and so on....
I've just made some dds tiles of a big jpg of Manhattan (overhead but close enough to see trucks etc.) that I found, (in fact I used the bmp to dds converter in Orbiters add on). Orbiter has a tile manager to help position these, I was stuck when it came to trying to do the same in Celestia ie giving them the right names . I dont have Exell, and so the calculator posted here wasnt of use. I ended up doing it a very laborious trial and error way, I'm sure it's easy when you know how- can anyone explain? or put up a link?
Also, I made the tiles 256 square as that was the size specified in the ctx, then found that they didnt have to be and actually seem to work better a bit bigger ie 1024 square, or even as a single 2048 tile, obviously these were just pictures that I had'nt done anything to so the lighting and so on isn't integrated with the rest of the textures, but just for a snapshot of a particular location they add some interest.
Anyway, its interesting to get a result of any sort,
cheers z
ps what keys do you press to see what files are loading in Celestia? cant remember and its not on help...

[maxim]

You have to press the ~ key - that means [shift]~ on american and [AltGr]~ on german keyboards.

Does that help?

maxim

[selden]

Unfortunately, the graphics code used by the two packages is incompatible: Orbiter uses DirectX graphics and thus can only run on Windows. Celestia uses OpenGL so it can run on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Ideas can be shared, but features can't be transported from one to the other.

OpenOffice includes spreadsheet software that is compatible with Excel. It's freely downloadable from http://www.openoffice.org/ It also runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

Does this help?

[ziggy]

maxim -thanks
selden- Does this mean that Linux and mac users cant see any of the dds files like the blue marble etc? I have tried some of the dds textures that are in orbiter, like there is a quite good gold foil square for the lunar lander, also solar panels for iss, maybe we'll see some of the other features or better in due course.

[selden]

Ziggy,

No, I mean only that the graphics code that is used in Orbiter cannot be used in Celestia.

The surface texture images should be usable, although some of them may have to be rescaled to be compatible with Celestia's "power of two" requirement. I seem to recall that the textures were a problem when the ISS model was translated a few months ago -- the one that bh is using in his "shuttle docked at ISS" models. (Although the problem that I'm remembering may just have been that they were bmp image files and had to be translated into jpeg.)

[Don. Edwards]

Wrong,
Orbiter's Textures are there own tweaked kind of DDS that is saved as a .tex. You can use a graphics editor to see a small thumb-nail of the graphic but once it is converted to a .tex it can't be converted back. Everything I have read thus far at the orbiter forums point in this direction. So there is absolutely no compatibility with Orbiter's to Celestia. Unfortunately it isn't the case the other way around. They can take any Celestia texture and convert it to a .tex format for Orbiter. So it is a one way street and all for Orbiter's sake at this point.
I am seriously considering making a posting in the Orbiter forum that the texture artist for Orbiter should start sharing there textures in standard .png, .bmp, .jpg, or .dds or I will no longer give any permission for any of my textures to be ported into Orbiter's proprietary format. And if I find any of my new works ported they will be hearing from a lawyer I can promise them that. I believe open source means open source and that means we should be able to use an Orbiter texture in Celestia with a mild amount of converting just as easily as they can port a Celestia texture into Orbiter format. All that being said I am at this point just a little ticked with this whole Orbiter thing. The more I think about it I am going to go and post a few choice words over in the Orbiter forum.

Don. Edwards

[Paul]

Don,

A virtual texture (.vtx) is Celestia-specific and can't be used in Orbiter (or any other graphics program for that matter, yes?). It has annoyed me just as much when someone posts to the Celestia forum "Hey, fantastic new planet texture!" only to find that it's a virtual texture that I can't convert for use in Orbiter (which I run much more frequently than Celestia). Is there a way to convert VTX back to a more widely-accepted format? If not, then I think it's only fair that you share the same "choice words" to some Celestia addon developers too!

FWIW, resolving such an issue may be as simple as emailing Dr. Martin Schweiger (the developer of Orbiter) and asking him for a description of the .TEX file format. Seeing as it's a free program, and many of the files it uses are already an open format, I'm sure he'd agree if he's not too busy.

Cheers,
Paul

[Don. Edwards]

Paul,
I don't know what you are talking about. A virtual texture is simply a texture that has been cut into tiles and then compressed using a DXT conversion tool. All you have to do is open each tiles .dds and convert it back to a workable graphic image such as a .bmp or .jpg. Than it will just take time putting all the pieces back together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it can be undone. Orbiter's textures and tiles can not be decompressed back to a standard graphics file. As I said I checked into this. Although Orbiter's textures are based on the S3 DXT DirectX conversion they fork the file into a format that can't be reworked witch means the texture is locked. That’s fine for texture authors that do not want there work going over to another program per say. But that is not the case with any Celestia texture at this point. They are fully open and can be reworked if you have the tools (programs) to do so. I have come across a few .dds textures that can't be opened and the image extracted but they are usually corrupt in one way or another. So your argument over this issue is void as far as I am concerned.
I will be writing a letter and posting it in the Orbiter forum in a day or two. It will be very civil and courteous and hopefully open a working dialog between Orbiter texture and add-on authors that would like there work being used in both programs. I will also try and write to Dr. Martin Schweiger and see what kind of response I can get from him.
There is absolutely no reason these programs, Celestia and Orbiter can't continue to exist in harmony. In fact they should be able to complement each other in many ways. I am hoping that maybe a common ground can be achieved and an even exchange to texture and add-ons can be ported back and forth between them. That way texture and add-ons authors can get more of there works used and word of their work can spread. But as things stand now it is all a one way affair going over to Orbiters advantage at this point.
I hope this clarifies my feelings on this subject more.

Don. Edwards

[HankR]

Paul,

Celestia's virtual texture format is really just a simple composite file wrapper; all the component images are in standard formats. Converting the components of a virtual texture into a monolithic texture is a technically trivial process.

Orbiter looks like a very nice program indeed. Unfortunately, as a Mac user, I am unable to use it. And because it is not open source, doing a Mac port is not a possibility, even if it were technically feasible.

Celestia is intended to be cross-platform, and although the primary development is on Windows, because it is open source software, Mac programmer volunteers have been able to make Celestia available for Mac users. Volunteer efforts have also made Celestia available to Linux users. As a result, the Celestia community includes many people who are excluded from using Orbiter.

Although as a Mac user I am not able to participate in the Orbiter community, I see no reason why there should be any animosity between the Orbiter community and the Celestia community. On the contrary, I think we all have much to gain by cooperation. As you suggest, it would be helpful in this regard if Orbiter's developer would disclose the details of any non-standard data formats. (Celestia's internals are already fully disclosed, of course.)

Don,

I understand your frustration, but please try to approach the Orbiter community with your concerns in a positive way. I think we all share a common interest in productive collaboration between the two communities.

- Hank

[Don. Edwards]

Hi Hank,
I have every intention of being very pleasant and open toward the Orbiter community. But there are a few things that need solving and working out. As I keep saying I am more than welcome for anyone in the Orbiter community to port my work over to it. I just want to know when and who is doing it. To that end as I keep saying unfortunately it is a one way street and as far as I know no one over there is porting there textures to Celestia. And trust me there are really some nice things buried in the add-ons that I came across. But as I stated since Orbiter's use of a proprietary texture scheme leaves we Celestia users out in the cold. I simply want to broach the subject and attempt to open a dialog with the texture and add-on artist over there. We really have nothing to loose and much more to gain. But of course if my letter to the Orbiter community falls on deaf ears and it gets a feeling of hostility than I will personally be taking certain measures to keep any of my work from being ported over. As I said I want to open a dialog get things rolling. In all likelihood we will be inundated with new material that will take time to go through. At least I hope things work out that way. So cross all your fingers.

Don. Edwards

[Darryl Roy]

First post to this forum.

I'd just like to note that Orbiter's .tex format textures for sizes 1k - 8k (Level 5 - 8 in Orbital nomenclature) IS in fact a variety of .dds format. I've bypassed Martin Schweiger's pltex utility with command-line calls to Microsoft's dltex utility, renamed the .dds output to .tex, and the output displays properly in Orbiter. I think pltex mostly rescales images and ensures that proper command line calls to dltex are made for mipmapping, transparency, specular reflections, and masking (for clouds and night textures). Unfortunately, these settings are incompatible with Celestia.

That said, the planet_tile.tex format that Orbiter uses for 16k textures, like Celestia's virtual textures, isn't[i/] backwards compatible at all. Every tiling extension of dds will have different formats for mapping and masking. In Orbiter's case, it also appears that there is a lot of horizontal (east-west) stretching of textures (in reference to the spherical coordinates) in polar regions to reduce filesize.

Why you would want Orbiter texture work is another matter - as someone who has gained familiarity with both programs only in the past month, it appears that the ONLY planetary texture available to Orbiter users that is superior to what I've seen for Celestia is the high-res Mercury add-on available at the AVSIM file library. Whether that's fictional in its detail (on the Mariner imaged side) is another matter. In every other case, the Celestia add-on is superior. Well, my own 8k version of the Blue Marble clouds is pretty spiffy too, but that was tweaked with inverse masking and bumpmapping to have textural interest both above and below the cloud deck. It lets one see more ground than Don's 'Realistic clouds', but less than the Orbiter default.

The big failing of Orbiter with respect to textures is its lack of runtime bump mapping or normal mapping. Many flat/albedo maps produced for Celestia don't look nearly as good in the Orbiter environment, and a texture converter must pre-bumpmap at some arbitrary azimuth/elevation any conversions for them to retain the same textural interest as seen by Celestia users.

I'm sure most any Orbiter community texture converter would be happy to provide .bmps for back conversion if asked. Unfortunately, I've already tossed my own cloud working files - pltex/dltex requires huge .bmp sources, and there's no going back from the .tex format. I was thinking of redoing my 8k clouds (to slightly [i]reduce the bumpmapping at orbital height). I do have a colorized 4k version of the 20k USGS Europa that I fought with for hours to reduce the contrast of high and low res mapped regions - its still not a patch on John Van Vliet's, although parts do look better.
[/i]

[ziggy]

Hi all,
Sorry Selden I forgot to thank you for the openoffice link, I will try it soon.
I can understand Don's irritation at his work being used without any credit or appreciation. A year or so back in the UK, the Automobile Association was taken to court by the Ordinance Survey, over a copyright issue, namely a driving map, the Ordinance Survey had cunningly incorporated a fictional topographical feature at an innocuous point in their map, an extra clump of trees or somthing like that, so the AA were caught red-handed. Possibly this idea would work instead of, or better than a watermark, at the expense of complete scientific accurracy. Perhaps, watermarks or other "branding" detracts from the work, and also act as a challenge to people to try and remove them...
As Orbiter is a free programme, the situation where Celestia textures(and others) can be used in Orbiter but not vice versa surely wouldn't be motivated by the developers in the Orbiter community wanting to keep their work to themselves; from Darryl Roy's post it seems it's just so it works in a particular way, so is that fair enough then? The tile manager utility certainly shows textures are stretched at the poles as he says.
It would be nice if there were (two way) importable features, as the two programmes have their own feel and outlook, it would enrich them both.
regards z

[Paul]

Don,

So you're saying that publishing VTX files is okay because an Orbiter user can take potentially dozens (or even hundreds?) of DDS files and spend god knows how many hours putting them back together into a single standard image file format.
That is crazy. Not only is that a bucketload of work in itself, it requires a fair bit of technical expertise, and sufficient hardware for image-processing large textures. Your own experience is obviously clouding your judgement of what's involved... you could do it easily, so it's ok for everyone else to have to do it??? Hardly.

You also keep implying that because the TEX format isn't yet common knowledge (which, incidentally, doesn't mean it's "proprietary"), when someone publishes a TEX for Orbiter, there's no way you can get a version of the file in a more portable format.

That's also rubbish. Just ask the author for one!!! Compare that to having to go through the headache of putting a VTX back together. In fact, because pltex is supplied with Orbiter, they can just publish a standard format (which they have done) and instruct people to run a single command line. Celestia authors could do that too - assuming that a similar single-line VTX conversion utility exists.

The only problem here is that nobody (except Martin Schweiger) knows what the TEX file format is yet, and for some crazy reason you want to whinge about it instead of A) simply asking Martin Schweiger for the format, or B) ask the authors of TEX files for standard format versions. Sounds a bit lazy to me.

Cheers,
Paul

[Don. Edwards]

Paul,
I can't even begin to do what you claim. I do not make virtual textures so I am the wrong person to ask. When I finish my 32k texture it is going to be converted to a VT by another texture artist that has offered to do it for me. I was simply stating the fact that a virtual texture is made up of common .dds files so they can be converted easily if someone wanted to take the time. The main issue here is that a texture that is for Celestia in jpg, .png, or .dds can be converted in a matter of minutes into a working Orbiter texture. The reverse can not be done. I can't convert an Orbiter texture to any graphic file that can be used by Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or Gimp and then converted to a form that Celestia can use. That is what the original premise of this thread was about. Celestia's textures are in an open format that can be manipulated with the programs. That can not be done with any Orbiter texture. Those are the facts at this time. Remember I did some checking of my facts. Once a texture is saved as a .tex it is locked. It can’t be reopened and manipulated. Until I see a utility that allows the conversion of an Orbiter .tex texture into a .bmp, .jpg, or even .png the whole issue over porting anything to Celestia is a mute point and a waste of time.
I am very sure I know exactly what a .tex is made of. I did read the docs that came with the utility. It is a separate form of S3's DXT Direct X texture compression. It is a sister to the .DDS texture but it is encoded differently which makes it incompatible with Celestia at this time. I know a few different games that also use this form of textures so, no it is not really proprietary.
But back to the main topic of this thread.
Ziggy asked if anything from Orbiter was cross compatible with Celestia and the simple answer is the same as it was at the beginning of the thread.
NO.
NADA.
Can't be used at this time. No matter how much you "whine" from the other side. Those are the facts and you have to accept them.
Now I will be spending some time trying to contact some of the Orbiter texture artists to see if they will be willing to make there work available in a more convenient format for use with Celestia. I am going to keep a record of everyone I contact and there response to my request. That way I can see just how eager they are to have there work used in Celestia. So at this point it is a lets wait and see what happens.

Don. Edwards

[t00fri]

That's also rubbish. Just ask the author for one!!! Compare that to having to go through the headache of putting a VTX back together. In fact, because pltex is supplied with Orbiter, they can just publish a standard format (which they have done) and instruct people to run a single command line. Celestia authors could do that too - assuming that a similar single-line VTX conversion utility exists.

Cheers,
Paul

Paul,

reassembling a VT texture is essentially a one command line affair, perhaps two. Hence in no way difficult/complex. Of course one has to know what to write into that command line;-). The latter question can easily be answered, of course...

But it takes a lot of time to run for large textures, for sure.

Now, I do not quite see why the Celestia authors should ask Celestia /users/ to undertake that extra effort. Celestia first, Orbiter second, I would intuitively argue from within the Celestia community;-)

Bye Fridger

[Don. Edwards]

I agree with Fridger on this 100%.
This is the Celestia Forum hence Celestia comes first.
Just as I would expcet Celestia to be second in an Orbiter forum.

I consider this matter closed for now!

Don. Edwards

[Flightgear-User]

I will be writing a letter and posting it in the Orbiter forum in a day or two. It will be very civil and courteous and hopefully open a working dialog between Orbiter texture and add-on authors that would like there work being used in both programs.

Don't forget the Flightgear folks.

We could need some 3d models like the Space Shuttle.


Flightgear is an Open Source (GPL) flight simulator:
http://www.flightgear.org

But as things stand now it is all a one way affair going over to Orbiters advantage at this point.
I hope this clarifies my feelings on this subject more.

Don. Edwards

Just protect the artwork via a License, for example the GPL lisence.
Then it is not allowed to use them in non GPL programms like Orbiter.