Textures Disable "downscaling" of Textures (Landsat and Orb2010)

[mattberg]

Hi there,
I just redownloaded and installed the Lvl11+14 Earth, Lvl11 Moon and Lvl11 Mars Textures made by the Landsatproject.
So far the Textures doing well, but how do I disable the "downscaling" to lower resolution if you are too far away?
I want to see the Hires-Textures the whole time (maybe not the whole, only if the Planet is bigger than a dot on my screen ).

Is there anyway how I can do this?

Greetings,
Matt

 

[orb]

Downscaled (lower level) textures are used to increase performance (they are loaded on demand) and reduce shimmering of the textures.

They should normally use the same base for textures, as the hi-res textures, so they should look the same. If you use a non downscaled texture, the downscaling is done by graphics card, and it doesn't need to look at all very good if the texture is downscaled more than 2-4x. You will see a shimmering of textures when you move the camera.

You can't disable downscaling, but you can change these parameters in Orbiter.cfg to make Orbiter use higher levels of textures for greater zoom-out:

PlanetPatchRes = 1
PlanetHipatchAperture = 0.1

The PlanetPatchRes is texture level that will be used for the planet, so to use higher level by default you need to increase it, but it will be capped by Orbiter to 10 if you set it higher. PlanetHipatchAperture is the maximum aperture when higher than level 8 textures will be used. I think that if you increase it to 1, then hi-res textures will be loaded and used when a whole planet is visible on the screen.

I tested it with those parameters set to:

PlanetPatchRes = 10
PlanetHipatchAperture = 1.0

and when I moved camera above the Level 11+14 Earth, when whole planet was visible, the Earth surface textures were shimmering, and it didn't look good IMO.