On 31/10/2007, Christian Buchner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I would like to get a few pointers where to look for information about the > terrain engine that is currently used by > Flight Gear. In particular about the irregular terrain mesh - how is it > created (at runtime or offline) and how does > photo texture currently get mapped onto terrain - how are roads and other > terrain features added? (is it all > vector or is it texture maps)
Our current terrain engine was great in the late 1990s (when MSFS still had a flat world), but it's pretty stale now, mainly from a lack of interest and the difficulty of understanding the code. It's actually deteriorated in some ways -- note that all the Great Lakes have been forced to sea level now, so that Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior are in deep gorges, and all the cities beside them are perched on cliff faces (that wasn't happening a couple of years ago). I'm not sure that we should really be maintaining our own terrain engine any more, though -- we should concentrate on aircraft models and flight dynamics, and try to interface with an existing engine. One promising prospect is Demeter, which works with OpenSceneGraph (already supported by FGFS): http://www.tbgsoftware.com/index.html Unfortunately, Demeter itself seems to have gone a bit stale -- some of the links from the site don't work any more, and it won't compile with the latest version of OSG. It does, however, support LOD and lots of other nice stuff (check out the screen shots!). Maybe someone should take it over if the maintainer has abandoned it, or fork it if the maintainer hasn't but is stalling on new releases. The best thing we could do in FGFS, in the meantime, would be to isolate scenery-engine dependencies so that it's easy to switch to a new engine when it's ready. All the best, David ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
