Celestia Newbie, have some questions and need some help

[Guest]

The main question I have is pretty stupid, but where do I put new textures so they show up in the program? I downloaded some high res textures of Mars, Earth, and Europa, and put them in the high res texture folder, but they didnt show up when I ran the program. I tried overwriting the medium mars texture with the high res one, and that just crashed the program when I went to view mars.

Also, what are some good addons I really need to try? So far the only thing I have is the addon that adds about 2 million more star systems. It sure slows things down, but it looks pretty too I thought I remember reading something about an addon that includes all of the asteroid belt, and another addon that puts in several more galaxies.

This may sound wierd, but I had a dream about this program last night (no idea why) and there was some addon that was 9 gigabytes, included 800 million addon galaxies, and 25 billion stars. Hah!

Brian

[Brian Short]

I guess I wasn't logged in when I posted that... oops!

Brian

[selden]

Brian,

Simply putting different resolution images in the medres folder should not cause Celestia to crash.

It sounds like the surface texture image files are corrupted. Maybe they were damaged during downloading. Or perhaps images of one encoding were renamed to have filetypes of some other encoding. A DDS image should not be renamed to have a filetype of JPG, for example. Celestia uses the flietype to determine how to decode the image file contents into rgb for display. Using the JPG decoder to interpret a PNG image can't work.

You might want to take a look at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/addon-intro.html It should help you to understand how the different files work together. Please let me know what needs to be clarified.

Catalogs of additional galaxies and some other deep space objects can be found at http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/catalogs.html

Does this help?

P.S. Merry Christmas! I hope Santa left you a new graphics card under your tree. You'll be needing one!

[Dave.C]

I am a new user to Celestia, and I too had problems getting the high res images to display. I was downloading the files and putting them in the high res folder, BUT I did not rename them. For instance, you could download something like earth-8k.dds, and it won't work unless you rename it earth.dds ( in retrospect it's so simple, but no one tells you that.)
Also you have to use shift-R keys to switch to the high res image.
If the earth.dds does not work for you, try earth.jpg (but the dds work much faster, but as Selden said, you may need a new graphics card)

Happy holidays !

[Bob Hegwood]

Brian,

This may be a stupid answer, but it's the kind of thing no one TELLS you about, and you may not KNOW about until you've played with the Celestia Package for a month or two...

Use a simple text editor like Notepad to edit your "Solarsys.ssc" file in the Celestia\Data directory.

First, save a copy of the original somewhere else so that you can get it back if you need it.

Second, find the planet you're trying to use the new texture for. If you look, you'll see that each of the objects rendered by Celestia has an entry in the file. If you'd like to use a NEW image for the planet Mercury, for example, simply change the entry which says:

Texture "Mercury.jpg" or
Texture "Mercury.*

to reflect the name of the NEW image you'd like to use. In this example, you might use the following:

Texture "NewMercury.dds"

Save the "Solarsys.ssc" file after you make your changes, make certain that the name you've typed into this file is the same as the name of the file you have in your Medres (or other) texture folder, and you should be all set to go.

Another piece of advice though...

Don't add another texture until you are CERTAIN that its Central Meridian is located in the exact center of the image. In other words, the point at which 0 degrees longitude is located must be at the EXACT center of the texture. If it isn't, location files won't work correctly, and scripts will show different objects on YOUR screen than they might show on another's screen.

Again, this may be a stupid answer, but no one ever told ME this stuff until I had already screwed up half of my Celestia textures by replacing them with images which did NOT meet with this criteria.

Hope that helps.

Take care, Bob

[Brian Short]

Thanks for the answers... I have new textures of Earth and Mars that are working... 8k textures for Earth, and 16k for Mars (what does this number mean anyway? All I can tell is that the higher the number, the more detailed, and big the file).

Anyone have some good suggestions for the best textures for each planet and moon so I can easily download some replacements? Hopefully in another year or so we'll have some great high res stuff of Saturn and Titan. I'd also like good textures for Jupiter and all it's major moons.

Right now I'm running on an Athlon XP 1700+ with 256 megs of ram and a 32 meg GeForce 2 card. I definitely need more ram and graphics power (not just for some upcoming games I want )... I have the 2 million stars addon, and it takes significantly more time to load, and runs quite a bit slower, but looks great.

Brian

[Bob Hegwood]

Brian,

Everything you'll ever want for Celestia is either available from, or listed on, Mr. Selden Ball's fantastic Celestia Resources Page at the following:

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/

Enjoy!

Take care, Bob

[Brian Short]

Thanks!

Brian