Texture Sizes?

[Dollan]

Hi folks...

If I'm running a Pentium 3, but I have a low end video card, what size textures would you reccomend I use? Currently I'm running Celestia 1.3.1 with the med res settings, but I'm not sure what this corresponds to. 2k? 4k? higher?

Thanks!

...John...

[selden]

John,

If you're running Windows, you can see Celestia's medres texture sizes by opening a "Desktop Explorer" window to the medres directory and selecting "tile" in the View menu.
Windows will display the sizes of the jpeg images next to each "tile".

Most of the medres textures are 1K x 512. A few are 2Kx1K, and a few are 512x256.

One of the advantages of the new "virtual textures" is that the individual tiles used in most of them are 512x512. As a result, they can provide a very high resolution image but minimize the demands on your video card.

Only you can decide what planet surface texture sizes are reasonable. It depends on how slowly they load and how much you enjoy the higher resolutions.

Does this help?

[Dollan]

Hi Selden...

Yeah, I think this helps. I've just finished downloading and installing Jestr's wonderful minor moon files, and I had to resize some to 1012x512 for them to work. I can do the same with other textures, I imagine.

My current goal is to get up to date textures for the planets and major moons now (I'm looking for a good Mercury at the moment), but with dial up, I didn't want to waste up to an hour or more downloading some of these, only to find that they won't work.

I guess I'm not really worried about operating performance when viewing the worlds; even with the default med res textures, things are awfully jumpy. As long as I can get a good still image, I'm happy.

So I think I'll go with a 2k (once I find one) and see what happens. If that's no joy, then I'll drop down.

Thanks!

...John...