Selecting new textures on-the-fly

[Andrewski]

Hi, I'm relatively new to Celestia (in Linux, anyway). As such, I've downloaded a large collection of textures which I'd like to 'try' on my computer. I'm not sure which ones would look good/work relatively quickly with my hardware, so I must resort to moving a texture to the spot where Celestia is looking, trying it, moving it away, and moving another to its spot.

It would be much easier if Celestia had a folder where one could put all one's textures for a given object in a folder (e.g. ./textures/earth/) and then be able to select one from them while actually browsing the object. This would be much faster, even if it meant having to wait as it redraws the object.

[John Van Vliet]

yes it might but you can use AltSurface to do it
re name the tex ( earth.png ,earth1.png ...)
and add

Code: Select all

AltSurface "earth1" "Sol/Mercury"
{
   Texture "earth1.png"
   NormalMap "earthnormal.png"
   
}

AltSurface "earth2" "Sol/Mercury"
{
   Texture "earth2.png"
   NormalMap "earthnormal.png"
   
}

for each map
then right click the earth while celestia is running and select earth1, earth2 ....

[Andrewski]

Well, this isn't bad, but it would be nice to have Celestia auto-select them from the appropriate folder so they'd be in the right-click menu without writing lines of code.

I'm thinking from a practical standpoint: in the scenario I described above, I have downloaded many textures, but will likely only keep a few per object. However, I won't know until I try them. So instead of creating lots of lines of code I will eventually delete, it would be nice just to delete the file if I don't like it.

But yes, what you suggest will work, albeit inefficiently.