Alternate surface question

[Guckytos]

Well i downloaded the "12 Earth's months of the year" from Fightspit and then noticed something irritating when using the addon.
I think it's related to Celestia itself. When using alternate surfaces with a high resolution, being in a high-res-folder, and activating teh addon with right-click/alternate surfaces/selection
Celestia automatically loads the alternate suface and switches to high res mode, even when being in medium or lowres mode before.

Is this a normal, wanted behaviour? The "problem" is that i have to switch manually back to med-res resolution after that.

Regards,

Guckytos

[Chuft-Captain]

I believe that this may be to do with the way Celestia finds texture files. The AltSurface command specifies the name of a file to use as the texture. When you select the alternate surface I believe that Celestia will try to locate the texture file firstly in the medres folder, then in hires, then in lores. I imagine that what's happening is that the file for the surface you select is not found in medres, and it is then found in hires and so Celestia switches to hires in order to display it (based on where it was found).
What I do sometimes with hires textures is to save medres and lores versions of the same texture as a file with the same name in the medres and lores folders. (try halfing resolution for each one).
So when Celestia goes searching for say "EarthMay.*" it will find the medres version, and will only go into hires if you ask it to.

I haven't really tested this solidly, but I think thats roughly what happens. Do a bit of testing yourself --- ie. Get a completely different image, put it in medres folder and rename it to same filename as your hires texture file. Start up celestia and select your altsurface. Note which image it uses. Should be medres image if I'm right. Change to HIRES mode and the texture should change.

Hope this helps.

[Chuft-Captain]

...When you select the alternate surface I believe that Celestia will try to locate the texture file firstly in the medres folder, then in hires, then in lores....

CORRECTION: Apparently the order is: medres, lores, then hires.

see: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celesti ... o.html#1.3