Just what is it you want to customize? Consider a simple 'snow in the mountains'. You can have
* early snow up north, the leaves have just started turning and the snow is on slightly yellowish trees up the slopes, no snow on green trees down * one day later - a bit of snow is still on the ground but has dropped from the trees * late snow - no snow on either slopes or valleys, but all leaves have fallen * snowfall a while ago, then winds - snow on the ground both on the slopes and in the valley, but the wind has cleared the snow from the trees on the slopes * fresh snowfall in midwinter - both ground and trees are snw covered (...) <add your other 10 different combinations here> Each of these can occur - so how is FG supposed to know what you'd like to see? Well, we don't need to simulate all of them, but the point is - I actually want to simulate all of them, because I like the idea of having infinite ways to see the same scene. Just how would you teach FG that the Netherlands are unlikely to be dust-covered, that autumn colors in Finland are never red, that German farmers tend to plough their fields before the winter so they appear earth-coloured in late fall, that tropical environments do not have four seasons, ... and at the same time consider plausible assumptions for what has happened the last few days? If you start thinking about it, the problem doesn't really factorize into regional xml and pre-defined dropdowns. Allowing the user to use snow-covered textures in Hawaii (about which nobody complained so far - it's a bit telling that the glaring flaws of the current scheme never seem to be a topic, but the inevitable flaws of any novel idea immediately make it prominently into the discussion ) is as bad as allowing the user to set too strong vegetation decay because he is still south. If you really want a heuristics which drives the shader based on some understanding of vegetation patterns, you need a lot of additional parameters. A dropdown doesn't solve anything on its own. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
