Vivian: > There seem to be significant issues with the loading of terrain. If we > load too much, the frame rate drops, if we load too little it looks poor, and > > AG radar doesn't work. Actually. We don't load enough for AG radar to work > realistically in any case. We probably need something between 50 and 100 > k for this , and we're unlikely to accommodate the memory requirements of > this, at least for 32 bit systems.
James: > a) is a trivial fix in the tile-manager, I think, and seems reasonable > to me. The only issue will be setting a sensible minimum size, since I > assume some people are brining the visibility down to reduce number of > tiles loaded, and hence RAM use / frame-rate. Okay, here are some experimental facts on my old 32bit system. I had a GeForce 8600M and 4 GB of memory with a 32bit Linux installation. With this setup, without using random vegetation and random buildings, I could render terrain with 250 km visibility range (I patched the binary for that purpose, otherwise it gets clipped at 120 km) without any problems in default scenery. I could easily do 120 km in custom scenery, and even with vegetation and buildings on 55 km were quite safe in custom scenery. So it's not true that fixing a minimum visibility of 20 km we'd run into 32bi memory issues. As for framerate, I'd guess that GPUs which are so old that they have real issues processing the vertex count of 20 km scenery fast enough are hit also hard by the fragment shader - but fragment shader load is independent of the visibility range. There are lots of forum users who have issues with low framerate - about anything (no random vegetation, no shaders, no random buildings, no complex planes, no AI traffic, no 3d clouds...) seems to help more than to get visibility down. I'm not aware of any single user who uses less than 20 km visibility because the framerate is not acceptable otherwise, and I have never seen anyone suggest this to users. Since vertex count goes quadratically in visibility, it matters a lot if you use 50 or 120 km, but not so much if you use 10 or 20. Nevertheless, at some point my suggestion would be to create a commandline-enabled legacy mode for really old hardware which gives you access to a minimal setup in which terrain radars, Advanced Weather &Co are disabled, but define the default setup of FG in such a way that terrain interaction based stuff can make assumption about how much terrain is loaded. For a halfway decent system, 20 km should not be any problem if I could run 250 km on a 5-year old laptop, and I think we can at some point make that default assumption and have a fallback option in case it doesn't work. * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
