64K/128K Specular Map Blue Marble Next Generation VT PNG !

[Fightspit]

In fact, the "dark zig zag lines" are in blue dark which is the backgrond of the BMNG surface map (you can test with CTRL - V) and I think there are problem of precision of 2-3 pixels when I resize several tiles in 2048x2048 between the Specular Map and the Surface Map.
I don't know if the other Specular Map (32K, 16K ...) have the same problems of precision with the other Surface Map in the same or different size.

[t00fri]

In fact, the "dark zig zag lines" are in blue dark which is the backgrond of the BMNG surface map (you can test with CTRL - V) and I think there are problem of precision of 2-3 pixels when I resize several tiles in 2048x2048 between the Specular Map and the Surface Map.
I don't know if the other Specular Map (32K, 16K ...) have the same problems of precision with the other Surface Map in the same or different size.

Yes, I am of course aware of this. You have to fine align the textures to each other for best results...That's always one of the jobs one has to do...

Bye Fridger

[Fightspit]

Yes, I am of course aware of this. You have to fine align the textures to each other for best results...That's always one of the jobs one has to do...

Bye Fridger

You mean I must change the color (black or white) pixel per pixel in all pixels which are near of seas and lakes It is a hard work which take a very long time , aren't you ?

[Fightspit]

I update the 128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip, you can download it now.

[t00fri]

I update the 128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip, you can download it now.

Thanks,

but what was wrong with it? What did you change?

Bye Fridger

[danielj]

So there isn??t a 128k texture of Earth,after all.It??s only a extrapolation similar to what jestr did in relation to Blue Marble DDS: JMIIDSS.64K texture and specmap is more than enough...

Fightspit,

is it correct that your 128k textures are NOT true 128k but blown up from the 86400x43200 raw textures?? So then your 128k would be largely "empty" magnification...
Reducing such data to the nearest power of two (64k) is a much more sensible procedure than blowing them up!

Bye Fridger

Yes, the texture come from here:
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/nasa/landmask/

and the 128K is not true (as the 128K earth surface map).

BMNG data have never been in a power of two size!
What scaling method did you use for blowing the data up to 128k?? I hope a good one, like cubic or spline or better?

++++++++++++++
The biggest really sensible power of two size for Celestia is 64k. It would be good to add the size of the original textures to your download info in ML.
++++++++++++++

In fact, the original texture is in PNG, I use Photofiltre to cut and to resize the textures in 2048x2048 using the "optimise" scaling method, that is all.
edit: I also use XnView to cut the big textures and rename all tiles.

[t00fri]

So there isn??t a 128k texture of Earth,after all.It??s only a extrapolation similar to what jestr did in relation to Blue Marble DDS: JMIIDSS.64K texture and specmap is more than enough...

That is correct. The actual size of the BMNG textures (base and spec) are 86k, not quite half way between 64k and 128k.

I strongly discourage to publish such textures that are BLOWN up, under the heading of "128k" textures. The little additional amount of detail and the artifacts due to /extrapolation/ of data are NOT worth spending another 10 GB or so. This should be made quite clear to potential downloaders! But it is my experience that on ML many downloaders are Newbies and often do not read well the infos that come with the download...


Bye Fridger

[Fightspit]

I update the 128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip, you can download it now.

Thanks,

but what was wrong with it? What did you change?

Bye Fridger

Because :

There is unfortunately a problem with the level5 Earth-spec tiles (128k):

While the optimized 128k Earth base texture now works beautifully together with my older 32k normal map tiles, my 32k nightlights tiles and the earth-spec tiles up to 64k, the level5 (2k x 2k) spec tiles corresponding to 128k produce a problem: As soon as I load the level5 (128k) tiles, they get displaced by a certain amount relative to the base tiles. The base texture continues to cooperate perfectly with my old normal map. This displacement does NOT occur for the levels <=4 of the spec-map that were also generated with my script.

Since my zsh script was also used for the base earth texture which works perfectly, the reason for the problem must be somewhere else. I made sure that for all levels the number of tiles is OK and the (dds) tiles look fine.

[t00fri]

I update the 128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip, you can download it now.

Thanks,

but what was wrong with it? What did you change?

Bye Fridger

Because :

There is unfortunately a problem with the level5 Earth-spec tiles (128k):

While the optimized 128k Earth base texture now works beautifully together with my older 32k normal map tiles, my 32k nightlights tiles and the earth-spec tiles up to 64k, the level5 (2k x 2k) spec tiles corresponding to 128k produce a problem: As soon as I load the level5 (128k) tiles, they get displaced by a certain amount relative to the base tiles. The base texture continues to cooperate perfectly with my old normal map. This displacement does NOT occur for the levels <=4 of the spec-map that were also generated with my script.

Since my zsh script was also used for the base earth texture which works perfectly, the reason for the problem must be somewhere else. I made sure that for all levels the number of tiles is OK and the (dds) tiles look fine.

Of course I mean: what did you do wrong the first time!? How did the shift happen? This may be instructive to know.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

At ML I still don't see any changes of BMNG_spec entries! Still version 1.0, date of last change still 21.3.06. And NO comments about the new upgrade?

Bye Fridger

[Fightspit]

Look here:

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creators/fightspit/

128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip 23-Mar-2006 13:41 288M

and

64K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip 19-Mar-2006 09:01 111M

It is Adirondack who have forgotten to change the nb of version...

[t00fri]

Look here:

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creators/fightspit/

128K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip 23-Mar-2006 13:41 288M

and

64K_BMNG_spec_PNG.zip 19-Mar-2006 09:01 111M

It is Adirondack who have forgotten to change the nb of version...

OK, but honestly, it appears that nobody can rely on this stuff. Didn't you control yourself, whether everything was right on ML???

Look, it's not your fault, but I am criticizing since a long time what is going on at ML in terms of QUALITY CONTROL:

-- ignorant reviews:
-----------------------
your first BMNG_spec was judged "good". I guess you meanwhile agree that your first BMNG_spec was NOT good. It was badly MISALIGNED, produced nasty black left-hand sea borders (due to 2-3 pix misalignment) etc.

So what are such reviews worth? NOTHING. They are merely misleading and cost people a lot of frustration...and possible download costs for nothing. We are talking about files that are hundreds of MB to a few GB long!

--negligent bookkeeping:
-------------------------------
It is paramount in case of such long files that there is a careful version/date tracking on which one can rely!

--unsatisfactory info description:
----------------------------------------
It is written nowhere that this huge 128k file is merely a blow-up from a file that has much lower resolution (86k).


Bye Fridger

[Kolano]

OK, but honestly, it appears that nobody can rely on this stuff. Didn't you control yourself, whether everything was right on ML

One can control...
-Files that are submitted to the ML
-Their descriptions

Specifics regarding the release schedules of files still seem to be up to the ML administrators. I believe it would be that way to help prevent possible abuse of the ML site (i.e. "ooh boy, a site I can upload gigs of random content to and download from" would be bound to lead to trouble).

ignorant reviews

Complaining does not resolve this. If you feel your views/opinions of add-ons are more valid please use the review feature to provide them (you could even point out inaccuracies in other reviews). Just as here, we can't expect every post to be "good"/"accurate", but given enough volume bad or inaccurate posts should be identified and corrected.

negligent bookkeeping

I tend to agree on this point. I tend to use...

http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/creators/

... to peruse the ML due to this, since the Apache directory listings do at least provide dates.

unsatisfactory info description

I partially agree with this. Though this responsibility still resides with the Authors. Part of the issue would be that Motherlode provides few guidelines for descriptions. If/When more guideance is provided I think we'll see improvement here.

---------------

The most important thing to remember however is that the Motherlode is a community site. Its administrators have generall been quite receptive regarding update suggestions/submissions. It would be more constructive to provide specific suggestions/submissions to fix the issues you have, than boycoting it.

P.S-Please understand I am not fully aware of all the specifics of your issues with the ML, some of which could be valid/significant enough to merit a boycott. I'm begining to grow tired of the continued shooting down of this important celestia resource.

[t00fri]

ignorant reviews

Complaining does not resolve this. If you feel your views/opinions of add-ons are more valid please use the review feature to provide them (you could even point out inaccuracies in other reviews).

I don't think you got the point. I am not at all complaining.
Personally, I am not using ML for myself. I only get involved with the ML for hunting down bugs in the code or trying to clear up peoples notorically imprecise bug reports in connection with Celestia development.

I have been arguing since years that this public refereeing system is nonsense. The present case is just a vivid illustration. I am tired of getting into the respective arguments over and over again! It doesn't mean that the system is good for quality control if Amazon or Ebay have it, right? That system is good for money making, but not for quality...

It would be more constructive to provide specific suggestions/submissions to fix the issues you have, than boycoting it.

Please note that my longstanding arguments related to the lack of quality control etc., are entirely UNRELATED to the fact that I have broken all contacts and cooperation with the ML people more rencently, due to an incident regarding my person in public. That has nothing to do with what you call a boykott. My public critique is much older than that particular incident. Yes, I was asked already at the very beginning of the ML to participate in some refereing and to contribute my experience in Celestia matters. We simply had widely differing opinions and perspectives at the time. So I preferred to stay out of it.

Please, realize that it was me who spent considerable time during the past week with Fightspit's 128k base and spec textures that he had uploaded to the ML (look at this thread!). I analyzed these textures carefully and pointed out SEVERE bugs, misalignments and lacking tiles therein that led to the respective updates.

++++++++++++++++++++
Since I dont use ML stuff personally, I considered this substantial work a service to the community to prevent more people to download GIGABITES of incorrect tiles!

In view of this, I can't follow at all your statements claiming that I merely complain about ML rather than actively doing something about it.
+++++++++++++++++++++

For my own needs, I am in an advanced stage of producing polar-latitude optimized and /pixel matched/ base, spec AND normal map textures, entirely from the original RAW binary BMNG files and the matching 3 arc-second SRTM topographic dataset of 86k size.

Bye Fridger

[Fightspit]

I can't tell a lot of things about CelestiaMotherlode but if , I inderstand you, you criticize it on all things that you have said before and I am not very surprise because I think the persons who display the addons in this website don't check all addons. That is why, when I post here to inform you that I made a new addons, I ask you if you have some problems or find some bugs with this addons even if I already check it.

About the 128K Specular Map, I think people who want to download it have read that the Specular texture need the surface texture and that they have read the "introduction" where it is written that the BMNG is the 84K (not 86K ). But, I agree with you when some people are not careful of the information of the addons and they can download it without to know the important things with addons.

I hope that you understand me with my little bad and poor english
And thank you t00fri to have find some bugs but I don't know if the problem of "zig-zag" can be solved with a short time...

[cartrite]

Was this misalignment issue ever resolved? I have seen that the watermasks from the bmng site don't line up right. I found a way to correct some of this but I still have a big problem. I haven't found a way of getting rivers and all the smaller lakes into the spec map. I can get most of the coastlines to line up though. As the following thumbs show.







cartrite

[Fightspit]

Can you provide us more screenshots with a better zoom (~level4 or 5) to see more better please?

BTW, I don't know how to solve this problem of misalignement on rivers and I don't have a lot of free time but if you or someone can better improve the qulity of the specular map (128K and why not 64K), he has my permission to modify my spec texture.

[cartrite]

Hi Fightspit,

I'm still working on VT'ing level 5 tiles. The finished product will be 64k at level 5 with 1k tiles. Here is a shot from the baja california area ( Tile A1 )in rendering modes basic, multitextured, open-gl vertex program, open-gl vertex program/nvidia combiners, open-gl 2.0. It is only a level 4 tile but it kinda shows what it will look like.











The spec map is in the alpha channel and that brings up another question.
This only happens with the Windows version. If the following option in the ssc file

Code: Select all

SpecularTexture "BlueMarble.ctx"

is used the spec map works in reverse. That is it lights up the land and not the water. Comment it out and it works normally.

Im still working on the program that does this but when I get a version that I think is stable and can compile with Windows, I'll post the code in a new thread. It's not that long of a program. It can produce a spec map in ppm format faster than the Gimp can open tile A1. Currently I am only building it with gcc 4.0.2.

cartrite

[cartrite]

This may show the results better.
The first thumb shows level4 tiles with the specmap I created.



And this one shows level5 tiles with the watermask downloaded from the bmng site.



cartrite

[Fightspit]

It is fine ! If you want you can update the "corrected" specular textures to the Motherlode . Let me know if you have finish your program to try on my spec texture I have done.