Alternate textures and Atmospheres

[bobdolesrevenge1]

Hi, I'm new to Celestia and have just started modifying planets and stuff. My current project is terraforming Ganymede (yes, I'm aware how impractical that is, it's just for fun) and have a question.

Is it possible to modify a planet or moon so that its alternate texture posseses an atmosphere but its default texture doesn't? So far, I can get Ganymede to have an atmo with both textures, but I can't seem to get it to work with just the terraform texture. Is there any way to do this, or am I just wasting my time?

[selden]

AltTextures only modify the surface textures. The atmosphere and clouds are not surface textures.

One way to display both views is to have them be at different times using Beginning and Ending directives.

[ajtribick]

This is one of the features I feel is sorely lacking in Celestia... as far as I know there are surface textures and cloudmaps for several times of year for Earth, and there are definitely seasonal variations on other planets.

I'm sure some of the high-quality add-on creators could do something really interesting with the extrasolar eccentric Jupiters and moon systems...

Ideally you'd want to be able to change all the maps, including specular, bump/normal and night textures, based on position of planet in orbit (e.g. using mean anomaly), or parent planet in the case of moons.