Feature Request: Level 11+

[wcomer]

With the introduction of NASA's WorldWind it is now trivial to create very high resolution tilings that are compatible with Celestia. In less than five minutes, one can download and import over to celestia tiles going down to level 16 (@512x512). There is only one problem, Celestia does not yet have the ability to show anything below level10. The time has come to remedy this situation. And for those who are worreid that this is distracting from the astronomy theme of Celestia, I should point out that WorldWind's lead developer is already planning to have Mars layers added; surely level11+ Mars textures are appropriate for Celestia.

[Kolano]

For the moment you can get an extra level by using 1k tiles and an extra level after that by putting 2k tiles at level 10 for the eqivilent of 12 levels x 512tiles. Though generally I'd also like to see deeper tile support too.

wcommer,
I saw a vague description of how to convert from WorldWind, regarding how its tiles aligned. I thought there was a lot of stitching and cropping involved, if attempted by hand. Is there a better description, or could someone provide one?

Better yet, is there a script or utility to do this psuedo-automatically?

[MB]

Unfortunately, it seems that the connexion with the NASA site cannot be established at least in France, as indicated in another thread (other info are welcomed)
MB

[chris]

Now that there's a ready source of high resolution texture data, I'll tackle this soon. It's not that difficult a task . . . Would anyone be willing to prepare a sample set of textures at level 11+ that I could test with?

--Chris

[smbika]

Hi,

I downloaded and installed NASA's Worldwind and it caused me some grief.
I do not know this for absolute posivitive swear on a stack of bibles sure but here is what happened:

1 - The "optional" necessary installation of the .NET runtime environment (C#'s equivalent to the JVM i believe) needed to create itself a user ID on my XP system - so when i booted up it made me log in and not go directly to the desktop as i had it set up to do - "minor" annoyance maybe but not something that needed to happen...

2 - after using it once and quitting (most but not every time), i would fire it up again and would get a stack trace pointing to direct3d and such (much like the audit trail java provides when it hits and exception)...after THAT i had to reboot to get it to work again...

3 - following this i would click on a desktop shortcut to a folder like "My Documents" and it would open - THEN, i would use an application like minesweeper or solitaire or ANYTHING which uses directx and then the shortcut "My Documents" and others like it would result in an error box telling me of a problem encountered with explorer and that if it persists (and it always did) i needed to reboot...everytime

sigh...

I may be making incorrect assumptions based on these events but when i uninstalled Worldwinds and did a system restore (I pathologically create a restore point before installing anything of significant hubris) and it ALL went away...

Anyone else see anything like this?

Other than all that the app was impressive and i got lots of good b/w shots from the usgs 1m mode - the other cooler modes - landsat 7, were naturally unavailable because the servers for such were overwhelmed and being shored up for the understandable flood of users.

Thanks,
Sean

ps - it installed something called "managed directx" or something to that effect - could this be a factor?

[danielj]

I would like to remember that there is a long way to +level 11 tiles on Mars.We still only have level 5 or maybe level 6 VT textures for Mars.But I am worried about graphic processing power.Do we need a 256 MB video card to load level 11 and up textures of the planets?Or a 128 MB is OK?

[wcomer]

Chris,

I have a tiles going up to level 16 that I'm happy to share as a sample. I need to prune them down to something which can be easily transmitted. Any request? Washington Monument and the Mall perhaps?

Kolano,

The trick you mention is sensible, but keep in mind that level16 is 64x the detail of level10. Hence it would require a 32kx32k level10 tile (weighing in a 500MB) for equivalent detail. To my knowledge the best graphics cards can only support 4kx4k .dds which is the equivalent of level13 detail.

If you modify the XML file for WorldWind you can set things up so that the cache uses the same tiling structure as does Celestia. The only thing required is to rename the tiles to Celestia’s format. This task is easily handled by scripts; I use a zsh script running on cygwin for this. If you are comfortable with using cygwin or a unix variant then I'm happy to give you my script. If this isn't the case, then you may want to hold off until a dos batch programmer writes up a script for windows.

cheers,
Walton

[wcomer]

smbika,

If you have had problems installing NASA's WorldWind the best place to report them would be the WorldWind bug forum:
http://tinyurl.com/56zeh

[chris]

Chris,
I have a tiles going up to level 16 that I'm happy to share as a sample. I need to prune them down to something which can be easily transmitted. Any request? Washington Monument and the Mall perhaps?

How about Mt. Saint Helens? The Washington Monument would be fine, too.

--Chris

[smbika]

smbika,

If you have had problems installing NSA's WorldWind the best place to report them would be the WorldWind bug forum:
http://tinyurl.com/56zeh

Thanks!
Sean

[jdou]

Hi Chris,

I also made a limited DDS VT for BlueMarble32K from levels 6 to 13.

I uploaded it to motherlode /incoming/celestia (ask to Joe )

If it's not good -> garbage

jdou

[alphap1us]

jdou's file is here

http://celestiamotherlode.net/creators/ ... _BM32k.zip

Joe

[smbika]

Jdou,

Well done!

Sean

[danielj]

I downloaded the try level 11-13 to BlueMarble DDS,but I didn?t find the levels 11-13 inside level 10.Could you please show me where in the map is Saddam?s palace(level 11-13)?It?s very hard to search for a tile when you are very near the surface.
Other thing:although the instructions say to put the VT files in BlueMarble DDS>earth,my addons only works if I put they in BlueMarble>Level 0,1,2,3 and etc.
About level 11-13,I simply cut these from BlueMarble DDS>earth and paste in the "main" Blue Marble directory.Should I need to unzip directly to work properly?

[piellepi]

Hi smbika!
After a night time download I started installing WorldWind at office but I suspected that ".net" frame was necessary even if installation says that it'a a optional item
As I rule of thumb, I am always suspicious when people at M$ force you to install tons of MB programs that are instead unnecessary to your common daily use
So I decided NOT to install ".net", as it was optional !
Now, in my machine I have DirectX 9 (release "c", the latest) so, when the installer asked if I wanted to install an earlier version, I answered NO!
Do you imagine which are the results?
The program, when you run it, stops immediately.
Do you imagine what I did immediately?
I disinstalled it!
IMHO I prefer Celestia!
What Celestia installs in MY computer is well known and I have no necessity to create restore point at all! (BTW Does anybody know how much precious hard disk memory restore point use? I suspect a great amount )
What else can I say?
Celestia forever!
bye
Pierluigi

[smbika]

Piellepi,

Thanks for the response and insight! I am quite happy with Celestia too and will wait till either I or someone else fills in the rest of the world with Virtual Textures.

I do not know how much a restore point takes but it can't be TOO much - I check my disk space frequently and it does not seem to go down too much...

I will not be installing anymore "ambitious" software like NASA World Wind because of the results we both had - too much pain and not enough reward!

Although with each improvement from Celestia comes a new problem (I will pretend they are not aimed at me but they seem to affect my particular enjoyment of it), it is STILL the most marvelous app I have found in the 10 years since I have owned a PC!

Long live it and the ones it road in on!

Ciao for now,
Sean

[jdou]

Hi Danielji,

You need a complete Blue Marble 32k with the level0 to 10 before to install the VT I made.

On my PC the path from the Celestia folder is extras\BlueMarble DDS\textures\hires\earth

If you unzip the file in the earth folder (normally) you will find the following VT :
Level6 : tx_79_20.dds
Level7 : tx_179_40.dds
Level8 : tx_318 and 319_80.dds
Level9 : tx_637 .... 638....
Level10 : tx_1275....1277...
Level11 : tx_2552....2554... (this level is incomplete but enough for try)
Level12 : tx_5108_1290.dds
Level13 : tx_10216_2580.dds (I think I made a mistake. It's rather 10217_2580 )

And finally a Celestia version that handles the Level11, 12 and 13 !

If you know where I can download this version say me

In the ZIP you will find a URL you can use to point exactly at the right place at level9.

Other subject :
I agree with Piellepi and the others guys about to download softwares you don't know what they do exactly.
I am not especially paranoiac but I would like to control what my PC do and understand why the "race beast" I have comes so slow sometimes because a lot of "services" not asked are running in background ?
And more, if you have installed a firewall you certainly know how M$ is gabby (Even Acrobate reader is !).
So, when I read what you said about this NASA software I am not disposed to download it (for the moment)
But it's just my "point de vue" (waoh in french !)

Take care (Bob like)

jdou

[Zarius]

Just wanted to note that given the comments here, I too was hesitant about installing Worldwind, I don't really like programs adding extra software on the side for me (especially when I generally already have the latest, eg. DirectX9c) - so when Worldwind asked me to install the .NET Platform I said no (since I already have that direct from the MS website, used for a few programs I've got and programming) and the Managed DirectX I also said no to.

And of course, as per the messages here, did WorldWind run? Nope... so I checked out the latest version of DirectX on the MS website, it now includes some of the managed code (and if I'm going to install a new version of DirectX, I'd rather do it from MS than WorldWind) - so I got that and tried it... still didn't run.

However the new version of Worldwind (1.2e) now runs on my machine without having to install the extra bits it wants to. Looks pretty impressive so far...
--
Zarius