General Question What are .tex files?

[Michkov]

Title says it all what are they for?

 

[TSPenguin]

They contain multiple resolution levels of planetary textures.

 

[mojoey]

:hesaid:

or...

they could contain the man himself :hmm: open it and find out

 

[Jarvitä]

Also LaTeX source files, but that's probably not what you were after.

 

[TMac3000]

They are files made in Texas:banana:

 

[N_Molson]

Made in Texas by Tex :lol:

 

[Spacethingy]

www.fileinfo.com is pretty useful for identifying files that you're not sure about.

Here's their definition about .tex's:

Bitmap image used for storing textures; can create the appearance of different surfaces and can be applied to both 2D and 3D objects; often used in video games (such as first person shooters) that support 3D texture-mapping.

Example video games that use TEX files include Avalon Heroes (which actually uses the .DDS format for its TEX files), Serious Sam, and Dead Rising 2. To open the TEX files used by Dead Rising 2, first rename them to have the ".big" extension, and then open them with Gibbed's DeadRising2 Tools.

TEX files can be opened by some programs that reference textures or use texture-mapping. They may possibly be opened with a generic image editor.

 

[MeDiCS]

ImageMagick recognizes *.tex and a truckload of other formats. On the command line, converting it is as easy as typing 'convert Earth.tex Earth.png', and I imagine GUIs are also available for it.

 

[orb]

www.fileinfo.com is pretty useful for identifying files that you're not sure about.

Here's their definition about .tex's:

Not the whole truth in case of Orbiter. While it's true that they are textures, the format of those files is different and Orbiter .tex files can't be opened by the same programs or games as .tex files described there.


Orbiter .tex files are containers of Direct Draw Surface (DDS) files used to store texture patches or tiles that will be applied on different spheres (surface of spherical planets, cloud layers, celestial background), or planetary rings (level1 = 1/8th, level2 = 1/12th & level3 = 1/16th of the ring).

Like TSPenguin said they are multilevel. They can contain from 1 DDS file (texture patch) inside of them for level 1, to 501 patches if they are level 8, and for levels 9+, a variable number of tiles, depending on their description contained in .bin file.

ImageMagick recognizes *.tex and a truckload of other formats.

ImageMagick doesn't recognize the .tex file format, but just .dds file format, from which the .tex file is made of.

On the command line, converting it is as easy as typing 'convert Earth.tex Earth.png', and I imagine GUIs are also available for it.

ImageMagick will convert only 1st DDS found in the .tex file this way, so just level 1 texture, or the first tile from level 9+ texture file. As such ImageMagick isn't the best program to convert these files.


To convert .tex file to a bitmap that can be edited by graphics editor you can use [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4114"]Tune Your Planet v0.3[/ame].

 

[Michkov]

So .tex files are like LODs for textures?

 

[Urwumpe]

So .tex files are like LODs for textures?

Sort of. But in an orbiter way. .tex files are for planets. They contain the planet textures in multiple resolution levels so orbiter can render the planet properly without too much bloat.

It is not like the usual Mipmapping that applies to the whole texture, but rather a way to select the right "texture tile" for the right region of the planet.