Originally Posted by
Blindkingofbohemia
Thanks Selden, now at least Celestia works...
Great!
Next question though.. How do I put my map onto a globe in celestia, and how do i edit the image?
That's two questions
To place a map on a globe, one must define a planet and specify the map as its surface texture.
To define a planet with a surface texture, one must create an appropriate "solar system catalog" and place it in Celestia's extras folder. Here's a minimal example catalog, just to get you started. It doesn't include atmosphere or clouds.
Code:
"my_planet" "Sol"
{
Radius 6000
Texture "my_map.jpg"
EllipticalOrbit { Period 1 SemiMajorAxis 1}
UniformRotation { Period 24 Inclination 20}
}
Use notepad (or your favorite text editor; NOT Word, WordPad or other word processing editor; I use emacs) to put this text into a file named my_catalog.ssc in extras. The first part of the name is your choice. The file type must be .ssc
In the extras folder, create the folder textures. In that folder., create the folder medres. Place the image my_map.jpg in Celestia\extras\textures\medres
Start Celestia, wait for it to go to the Earth.
Type
<enter>my_planet<enter>
where <enter> is the Enter key
"my_planet" should appear at the top left of Celestia's window.
type the letter
g
Celestia's viewpoint should turn and go to the planet "my_planet"
As for how to "edit the image", you can use Celestia's various commands to look at your planet from various directions and distances, to make time go by faster or slower (so you can see different parts illuminated by the Sun), etc. You can add directives to the ssc file to give your planet atmosphere and clouds, to specify a bumpmap to give its mountains the appearance of height, to specify a specularmap so sunlight glints off its oceans, etc.
Celestia includes a "capture image" command so you can take a .PNG or .JPG snapshot of what it's drawing, and then use your favorite paint program to modify that snapshot.
To get you started, I've attached a zip file (my_addon.zip) which includes a catalog and a shrunken version of your map already in appropriate directories. If you extract this zip file into Celestia's extras folder, Celestia should show your planet.
An verbose introduction to creating Addons (like your planet) for Celestia is available at http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/cel...don-intro.html
A Celestia user's guide is available at http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalo...mentation.html
A detailed reference manual for Celestia is available at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia
I hope this helps a little.