> Agreed, this stuff is all about plausible heuristics, but I think this > one fails the 'plausible in enough areas' test. Hopefully we'll (soon) > be able to suggest land cover updates to fix any areas with these kind > of data issues, once the world scenery rebuild completes.
Somewhat ironically, the procedural heuristics tends to produce (at least for my taste) much better visuals in lowres scenery than in hires scenery. The reason is that while I can fix tiling and detail resolution for good, I can not really fix the sharp landcover boundaries. I can de-emphasize them by having one or two overlay textures continuous across a boundary, so they don't stick out dramatically at first sight as they would do without texture mixing, but I do not know how to make them really go away except in very specific cases (using vegetation ordering in altitude and gradient in the mountains) - the shader simply doesn't know where the seams are, so they can't be hidden. As a result, we get beautifully organic transitions of forest into grass or rock patches where the shader drives the transition, mixed with the straight line divisions introduced by landcover (and terrain tile) boundaries. And thus for instance the lowres desert scenery around Las Vegas where all is essentially classified as ShrubCover and then all visible structure is generated by the shader looks more to me a bit more compelling than hires France scenery where lots of rock bands are genuine landcover. So to my mind, the landcover boundaries are currently the single most severe obstacle to close-to-photo-quality terrain rendering, and I think any strategy to give the shaders the means to smooth them over would be highly valuable (needless to say, I don't have any idea how to do that in the current framework - somehow if we would know the center position of each triangle, we could expand it in the vertex shader to overlap with the neighbours and make the edge more transparent in the fragment shader - that would do the trick - but we don't have the triangle center position...). Anyway, my 5 cents... * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master SQL Server Development, Administration, T-SQL, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS and more. Get SQL Server skills now (including 2012) with LearnDevNow - 200+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only - learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122512 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
