Programming Question Role of Texture and Texture2 folders

[paddy2]

Have been playing with adding some texture tiles to a Moon base I am making.

In the past I have just added files/tiles via Orbiter Base maker and let it do all the work. ( Works a treat, no thinking needed)

As I am adding more tiles than OBM shows I am having to do it by hand and am being forced to think about "Do they go into texture or texture2 folder?"

I understand the use of subdirectories in "texture" for meshs and UCGO. So long as they are quoted in the mesh then orbiter will find them. I have used Dans Base tile maker and it slices up a big file without issue and gives me a list to paste into the .cfg file. These all go into "Textures"....... so whats the job of "textures2".

Years ago there was a limit to the number of files that a single directory could handle, is it just a throwback to the past.

Any pointers / info would be a help gents and again, Thanks in advance.:beathead:

 

[asbjos]

In general, big textures (like planet textures at level 9 or higher) are usually placed in the Textures2 folder.
Orbiter will first look for textures in the Textures2 folder, and if it doesn't find the relevant texture there, it will look in the normal Textures folder.

 

[paddy2]

So ground texture into tex2 and mesh textures into tex, as a general rule then

Any idea of why the two? Not a big deal but would like to know!

 

[thepenguin]

Orbiter will first look for textures in the Textures2 folder, and if it doesn't find the relevant texture there, it will look in the normal Textures folder.

Looking at this description, it might be for non-destructively modifing textures by replacing them.

 

[fort]

Hello,

I do not where I saw in the forum, or in orbiter 2010 itself or beta, but it is possible, in a configuration file to tell orbiter.exe the place and maybe even the name (possibly a name other than their original name ) of certain files containing program data ( including "textures" and "textures2" ) . So another tree and other folder names as the default ones . Martin Schweiger mentioned this in a post a year ago on the forum.

This does not explain the reason for the existence of two folders, but this feature has several advantages:

- with two install of orbiter , to share a single, common, folder in the case of the use of common textures ( especially the tex files . ).

- to be be able to make "appear" or "disappear" in that dedicated configuration file textures of high weight (often textures in textures2 ) and thus launch or not these textures during a simulation or test for which the textures are not necessary. For sure, it will be possible as an alternative to rename, for example, temporarely Textures2 for example with another name to isolate it from Orbiter during a lanuch.