Where Are All Of Don's New Textures At?

[Don. Edwards]

Hello and Merry Christmas to all.

I guess I should take the time to explain why my texture projects are taking so long. Many of you have been waiting patiently for Terraformed Mars, Ancient Mars, Earth Season?€™s, and a few other projects I have on the backburner, namely Project Sahara aka Gunsmoke. The main reason is I simply have had my time consumed by work. The second reason is a twofold problem. First Celestia is starting to use some very advanced features. These of course don't impact the main texture but they do impact the normalmaps I have created in the past. The main issue is the strong migration to the OpenGL 2.0 standard in Celestia. The new standards render all my normalmaps useless under OpenGL 2.0. So I have been waiting for Fridgers nmtools so that I can import my normalmaps into these tools and create all new normalmaps that will work under OpenGL 2.0. But so far from what I have read of Fridger's instructions on the CelestiaMatters site, I may still be unable to use these tools to create the new normalmaps. There simply are not any tools out there for making these new normalmaps that seem to work for me. The nmtools instruction are as of yet incomplete, and the newest version of NVDXT tools that supposed to able to creat these new normalmaps simply crash or give me a uslles output file that ends up crashing Celestia.

I can't knock Chris for moving over to the new normalmap format for Celestia but I have to wonder what good it is at this point as there are not any downloadable normalmaps that are even compatible for the new OpenGL 2.0 paths he has built into the program. Building in new features of course is great, but not having the tools to make the textures to work with the features is a bit of a misstep and not having a downloadable source for even an Earth normalmap in the new format is downright silly. Also not offering to have an option of backward compatibility has its own issues as they seem to be popping up all over now from what I have been reading.

So I have all these textures I have been working on and I have no OpenGL 2.0 compliant normalmaps to offer anyone and it isn't looking like I am going to have any the near future either. So at this point I just don't know what to do anymore. Generating normalmaps the old way is still possible but the quality I have been getting is just terrible. I would be ashamed to release any the recent normalmaps I have created. I have no idea why they are so bad or what I might be doing wrong.


So at this point I just don't know what to do. I have the Terraformed Mars texture, six of the Earth's season?€™s textures, and a few other really nice planetary textures ready for finalizing and uploading but I have no normalmaps for them that are going to work under OpenGL 2.0 or even look good under the older Nvidia combined rendering path. At this point I am seriously thinking of simply dumping them into a directory in my account on the shatters.net server and letting whoever wants to take them on do so. I guess I just can't keep up with the changes. This doesn't mean I am leaving or anything. Just that I have reached a creative impasse of sorts and don't know how at this point to get out of it or even worse if I even want to try.

Well that wraps it all up in a nutshell. Not really sure what to do at this point anymore. But I thought I owed everyone an explanation as to why so many of my projects seem to languish as vaporware for so long.

Thanks for sticking in there and if anyone has some ideas let me know.

Don. Edwards

[Cham]

Don,

don't forget Celestia 1.5.0 is still in an early phase of development (alpha software ?). It's full of bugs and problems and it may take a while before it's ready to use for everyone. Don't let this stop you in your creation process. What I'm suggesting is this : let the user play with your textures and see how the normal maps are doing. This is important, since it may help Chris to tweak the software.

Personaly, I'm still extremelly interested in your old Mars, and its terraformed version.

And merry christmas to you, by the way.

[bh]

Don...merry xmas buddy. I understand your frustration...I myself will not be anywhere near 5.1 until oneday. Keep on with your stuff. I've just switched to mac and finding my way round all over...good fun if you're in the right frame of mind!

[t00fri]

Hi Don,

I think there are a number of misunderstandings.

A properly done normalmap will run under all rendering paths, including OpenGL 2.0. So no need for any conversion. But in order to profit from the new features of 1.5.0 you should switch to OGL 2.0.

My nmtools are NOT converter type of programs that might render old normalmaps any more compatible with OpenGL 2.0


The nmtools package is now available in our newly OPENED CelestialMatters site. Just click on my respective icon below my post. There is also already a large part of my online tutorial in CM. Unfortunately the last section with concrete step-by-step examples is still uncompleted.

Note that the nmtools ALWAYS assume professional heightmap data files as input! Just as you can download them from the scientific sites for Earth, Mars etc. Typically this would be 16bit raw integer format either in little or in big endian storage mode.

I hope this has cleared up some of the issues connected with normalmaps that you were addressing.

Merry Christmas to you and happy holidays,

Bye Fridger

[chris]

I can't knock Chris for moving over to the new normalmap format for Celestia but I have to wonder what good it is at this point as there are not any downloadable normalmaps that are even compatible for the new OpenGL 2.0 paths he has built into the program. Building in new features of course is great, but not having the tools to make the textures to work with the features is a bit of a misstep and not having a downloadable source for even an Earth normalmap in the new format is downright silly. Also not offering to have an option of backward compatibility has its own issues as they seem to be popping up all over now from what I have been reading.

So I have all these textures I have been working on and I have no OpenGL 2.0 compliant normalmaps to offer anyone and it isn't looking like I am going to have any the near future either. So at this point I just don't know what to do anymore. Generating normalmaps the old way is still possible but the quality I have been getting is just terrible. I would be ashamed to release any the recent normalmaps I have created. I have no idea why they are so bad or what I might be doing wrong.

Don,

There should not be any problems using existing normal maps with Celestia 1.5.0 and the OpenGL 2.0 rendering path. When I first added support for compressed normal maps, I did indeed introduce an incompatibility with existing DXT compressed normal maps. But, I have since changed things around so that both DXTnm compressed normal maps and regular compressed normal maps can be used in 1.5.0. Celestia distinguishes between the two formats based on the file extension: .dds files must be renamed to .dxtnm if they are DXTnm compressed. All of the normal maps that you've already created should work exactly as before, with no reduction in quality. If that's not the case with the latest 1.5.0 prerelease, then there's a bug in Celestia that needs to be fixed before 1.5.0 is complete.

So at this point I just don't know what to do. I have the Terraformed Mars texture, six of the Earth's season?€™s textures, and a few other really nice planetary textures ready for finalizing and uploading but I have no normalmaps for them that are going to work under OpenGL 2.0 or even look good under the older Nvidia combined rendering path. At this point I am seriously thinking of simply dumping them into a directory in my account on the shatters.net server and letting whoever wants to take them on do so. I guess I just can't keep up with the changes. This doesn't mean I am leaving or anything. Just that I have reached a creative impasse of sorts and don't know how at this point to get out of it or even worse if I even want to try.

Well that wraps it all up in a nutshell. Not really sure what to do at this point anymore. But I thought I owed everyone an explanation as to why so many of my projects seem to languish as vaporware for so long.

Thanks for sticking in there and if anyone has some ideas let me know.

Try out the latest prerelease and let me know if you still have problems with your textures. If you do, please post some screenshots so I can help you figure out what's going on.

--Chris

[Don. Edwards]

Thanks everyone for the input.

Fridger, Thank you for the info and I have downloaded the nmtools as son as I saw the site had gone live. I look forward to the rest of your step by step guide.

Chris, I was unaware of the changes. I guess I missed the updated info due to my popping in and out. I will download the newest build and see how things work.

This should move things forward now. So its back to the graphics grind for me.

Don. Edwards