A RANT ON PLANETARY TEXTURES

[David Knisely]

I'm afraid that I am rather frustrated at this point with trying to change the various default textures for the planets, specificially the Earth and Mars. What I am doing wrong a bit of a mystery, but I do have one thing that those of you who are putting up these replacement textures need to do: PUT DOWN EVERY SINGLE STEP IN THE ORDER IT MUST OCCUR IN ORDER TO LOAD AND EXECUTE EACH AND EVERY NEW TEXTURE! This is not being done in a manner which is consistently understandable, and this is especially true for the bump and normal maps, which are puzzling to say the least (Do they go together? Do you need both files, or more than two files? Where do they go in the directories for Celestia? What do you do to the solarsys.ssc file? Which lines need to be changed, and how? Do you need another .ssc file to make things work, or is it created somehow? How to you activate things once Celestia is running?). An attempt to change things results in questions upon questions upon questions, and these are not being properly addressed in any FAQ. The two-step procedure FAQ is WOEFULLY inadequate. It needs to be explained as follows:

STEP 1: get the file (and be *specific* if any additional files will be needed before running the program (clouds, night-lighting maps, bump maps, etc.).
STEP 2: PUT EACH REQUIRED FILE EXACTLY IN THE SPECIFIC DIRECTORY LOCATION REQUIRED (and be sure to state whether any additional directories need to be created and where they need to be put).
STEP 3: MODIFY (if necessary) the solarsystem ssc file in EXACTLY the lines needed and in the exact way it needs to be done (NO generalizations here). If more than one file is needed, the locations must be stated specifically.
STEP 4: Do anything else that is needed to make the new texture work before running Celestia again.

I like the rendering Celestia does with my NIVIDIA board of Mars with realistic shadowing effects of the various topographic features (i.e. not just an image mapped to a rotating sphere). I wanted A LOT more resolution than the default mode if that is possible. However, I have not succeeded in figuring out which files will work (bump maps, normal maps, cloud maps, whateverelse maps), where they will need to go (subdirectories), and what changes (if any) need to be made in the solar system file or any other file. I tried a number of things but either I made things worse or it just didn't work to begin with. I have added a number of things successfully (Babylon 5, etc.), but the planetary textures seems to be an obscure art that no one seems to let those out of Celestia's inner circle know exactly how things are done. One source gave me a specific example of how to do a 3 or 4 level .jpg improved mars "flat" texture and I got it to work, but I have no idea how to get one with a higher resolution to work based on that limited example. That method did not require a change in the solar system ssc files (it may have installed one on its own), so again, there is more confusion. Part of the time, it looks like Celestia is just detecting things on its own (it finds the low and medium res textures, but not the high res ones), but other times, it looks like to modify things, you need to alter the solarsys.scc file. This becomes rather confusing if you don't know the EXACT proceedure. The proceedure needs to be specified for each and every file posted on the add-ons pages, rather than just "assumed". Otherwise, more people will be turned off from trying to get Celestia to put out some of the amazing screen images I know that the program is capable of producing. Thank you.

[selden]

David,

Please take a look at
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/textures.html
and
http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... intro.html
They may help somewhat.

[t00fri]

David Knisely,

I am sure you are aware that many have managed without major complaints or frustration. Many means REALLY many

If the few active developers that we have start spending their time on writing step-by-step instructions for ADD-ONS then development would stagnate entirely. It is rather up to the users (who create these ADD-ONs) to write manuals.

Another possibility would be that users who had initial problems like you, write instructions as they would dream they should look like....Celestia is free software, implying that community efforts are needed to make everyone satified. So we DO need contributions from people like YOU with definite ideas how such instructions should look like.

Finally, this forum is considered to be a huge resource pool with a powerful search engine. You are explicitly encouraged to use it if you plan to expand Celestia beyond the default setup of the distribution.

Honestly, I have no idea how one can do much wrong at least as to installation of new non-VT tile textures. Just drop the new hires textures into the hires folder (e.g. an 8k or 16k earth), name it like indicated in solarsys.ssc and switch to hires after starting Celestia by pushing SHIFT-R,
( as explained in the key-shortcut help).

In order to become more fancy, you next have to retrieve the respective Keywords (to be placed in solarsys.ssc) for adding specular lights, night lights, clouds, bump or normal maps...drop the respective files into the hires folder and write their names behind those keywords and you are done.

All file names have to be written in quotation marks as you can see in many similar cases in solarsys.ssc. In the default solarsys.ssc you find explicit examples of how to use most of these keywords except NormalMap.

Bye Fridger