Re: [Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-10-11 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 This is to give a heads up on some changes that I'm planning for
 Random Buildings for the V3.0 release, and to allow for
 comments/suggestions/ideas.

I've now got the new system broadly working on a private build:

http://www.nanjika.co.uk/flightgear/buildings.jpg

I've managed to minimize apparent tiling by randomly choosing between
building sizes and random objects at each point (subject to dimension
restrictions).

I need to sort out the random objects which need to be rotated by 90
degrees (see the bottom left where an orange school building goes
across the road).

As expected, the downside is that creating the object masks takes
quite a bit longer.  It's taken me about 4 hours to generate the mask
used here for the city1.png texture.  Generating the buildings at
runtime is also a bit slower so I expect to implement the PagedLoD
next.

-Stuart









 In 2.12.0 the algorithm for the placement of random buildings is a
 rather scattergun approach.  materials.xml sets a building density
 (amongst other building attributes) which is used to generate a number
 of random points on each triangle that makes up the scenery.

 These random points are checked against a mask to ensure they aren't
 being placed in the middle of roads, and then rotated to the correct
 orientation to match the texture (using the red channel of the mask).

 This broadly works, but the placement is fairly unrealistic:
 - The mask is quite broad, and some buildings quite large, so they can
 still stick out into the roads, and generally don't line right up
 against the street.
 - The spacing of buildings has to be quite conservative.

 So, in V3.0 I plan to change this. Instead of using a scatter-gun
 approach to placement and a mask, random building location will be
 read directly from the mask, defined by a single pixel.  The color
 (actually blue value from 0-255) will define the size of building
 (small medium, large), and the red channel the rotation.

 So instead of a material designer blocking out a large area for random
 buildings to be placed within, they will define the specific location
 for each random building.

 Creating masks is going to require quite a bit more work in the new
 world, but the end result should be better.

 There is an open question of how to handle random object placement,
 which also use the blue channel of the object mask:

 -  For areas that don't use random buildings, I'm tempted just to
 leave it as-is for the moment, as it reduces the number of object
 masks that need to be re-created.

 - For areas with both random buildings and random objects I'm planning
 to make groups of objects to specific blue values.  So, a blue value
 of 234 might equate to placing a silo or a farmhouse, while a blue
 value of 233 might place a church, or tower block.  The mapping will
 be defined in the materials.xml file.

 Command, questions and offers of help to update some object masks are
 all welcome :)

 -Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-10-11 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Tim,

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Tim Moore wrote:
 Cool stuff. Are those all individual models, or instanced geometry, or what?
 :)

The vast majority are instanced geometries, though there are some random
models interspersed.

As mentioned previously, I'd like to move back to the previous implementation
from (IIRC 2.8.0) where the buildings were collected into massive objects as
it provides collision detection and more variety.

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 1:54 PM, geneb wrote:
 Is it possble to place buildings manually and have the random buildings
 fill around them without interference?

Not yet, but that's a known bug that I would dearly like to fix. I'm hoping that
the refactoring required to implement the PagedLOD will provide access
to the data required.  At present the static objects (e.g. manually placed
buildings) are only ingested after the geometry and random objects have
already been generated.

With the PagedLOD approach the random objects will be generated only
when the aircraft gets into range, so I'm hoping I can simply check against
the bounding box of each static object.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Mipmapping of liveries

2013-09-26 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 8:27 AM, James Turner wrote:
 Just to say, Thorsten has in this case saved me writing an email, thanks.

 To re-iterate - GPU VRAM is a precious commodity, so we should spend it on
 texels you can actually see.

One further point to make is that we do have the AI/Aircraft directory
specifically
used for low-poly/resolution models.

So, if there are specific aircraft that are causing problems, arguably
the correct
way to resolve them is to create an AI version.  This would be quite a good
task for someone wanting to get to grips with modeling, as it's easier to remove
things than add them.

Perhaps we should mandate that aircraft over a certain size should have an AI
version created?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Help for Aircraft Graphics

2013-09-26 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Satish,

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Satish Srivastava wrote:
 Kindly tell me the platform and code for only simulating the some aircraft
 like jaguar graphics. My interest is to simulate flight by giving string of
 aircraft data necessary for flight like velocity, acceleration, roll, pitch,
 yaw and control surface positions.

If you want to use FlightGear to visualize data from another source,
there are lots of options.

Under the Docs/ directory of your Flightgear installation there will
be various README files, and a README.pdf file which is compilation
of all of them.  Have a look at README.IO and (IIRC) README.generic
for information.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Moving menus (aka, usability)

2013-09-26 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:45 AM, James Turner wrote:
 I was reviewing the current menu structure and would like to propose a couple 
 of changes. Partly because we have too many menus, all quite short, but also 
 to remove some bad terminology.

 Each of these changes is independent, comments explicitly requested:

  - merge 'Autopilot' into the Equipment menu, as a section (probably the 
 first section)

 Autopilot is just another piece of equipment, and route-manager and GPS are 
 really parallel features, since route-manger is basically the FMC. The 
 combined menu is still a reasonable length. Aircraft without the default 
 autopilot (including the C172) would need to
 disable just those menu items, but that's ok

OK with me.

A while back I introduced a Nasal abstraction layer so that aircraft
could disable particular menu items without needing to know the the
structure of the menu itself.

So, in theory this should be pretty straightforward and not require
any aircraft updates.  However, I think you'll need to update the
Nasal code (in gui.nas IIRC - not at my FG computer right now) so that
the autopilot item now maps to the full set of autopilot items.
That's slightly ugly, but at least hides this from the aircraft
developer.

  - potentially rename 'Environment' to 'World'

 This is less of an issue, but makes sense with the next one:

 - Move the AI items elsewhere

   -- Traffic / Scenarios move to 'World' menu
   -- ATC services mode to World or Equipment (opinions requested)
   -- All the 'controls' for tanker/carrier/wingman also move to world (or 
 somewhere even smarter … unfortunately PUI doesn't support sub-menus)

 The rationale here is that 'AI' is a completely meaningless term for most 
 users, and the way we use it in FlightGear has long since ceased to be 
 accurate. 'AI objects' are really what is normally called a 'mobile' or 
 'actor' in most game engines. So the menu needs to either be removed or 
 renamed, and I don't think there's a sane meaningful new name, compared to 
 relocating the items.

 If most of the AI stuff moves to 'World', I think that name makes sense - 
 it's about things outside your aircraft, which does include tankers, carriers 
 and scenarios, as well as the weather and time/season.

I'm OK with this as well.

I expect that such large changes will require a significant update to
The Manual, so please let me know what the final changes are once you
make them and I'll update The Manual code.

 A separate step, much harder to make happen, would be to explicitly reserve 
 the Ctrl (Command on Mac) keybinding space for menu/non-aircraft keyboard 
 shortcuts. I would really like to do this so we can have user-friendly 
 key-bindings for dialogs and standard items, such as Ctrl-Q to quit, Ctrl-A 
 for autopilot dialog, Ctrl-P for pause, Ctrl-R for reply, etc. [And the 
 entire normal key / key + shift / key+alt ranges available FOR aircraft 
 functions, of course) The problem is right now we have aircraft using Ctrl- 
 shortcuts for many things (usually because they're the only choice), and I 
 can't decide a sane way to migrate to this split without lots of breakage and 
 frustration. Any ideas welcome.

I think this is a good idea.

I think it would be worth doing this as part of a wider re-org of the
keyboard so we only have to re-assign keys on aircraft once.

 I'm sure there are various keys (time/sim acceleration) that pre-date
the GUI and really no-longer need/deserve key bindings for the
majority of users.  Hopefully that would free up some keys, and allow
us to set aside a standard set of keys for aircraft bindings.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-09-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 Which would in fact not make them random buildings at all :-)

It'll make them less random, certainly :)

However, while the placement and size class (small, medium, large)
will now be determined by the texture, there will be still be
randomness for each building in terms of width, depth, number of
floors and texture.  I need to prototype this to understand whether
that's sufficient to fool the eye or not.

The other avenue I'm looking at is whether the texture scale is
correct.  IIRC the city1 texture is 1024x1024 and covers a 1kmx1km
area.  I need to measure some street widths, as I suspect that might
be a bit small.  It may be that we can increase the texture coverage
without increasing the texture size, which would reduce the
repetition.  Or just decide that cities are important enough to be
worth a larger texture.

 May I propose to think about something more ambitious? One thing which bugs 
 me is that we have now well-working de-tiling strategies for terrain, but not 
 really for city textures and agriculture. Forest is effectively de-tiled by 
 placing sufficiently many random trees on top - but we still get huge tiling 
 artefacts for large city areas or fields.

 Deterministic 'random' building on top of that will make the tiling problem 
 worse, because you get repeating patterns now in both texture and objects on 
 top, which wasn't the case with the scattergun.

 I think one could at least partially solve this by subdividing the terrain 
 into individual coordinate cells and give each city texture inside the cell a 
 random orientation of the texture. The template would be the sparse dot noise 
 function introduced in terrain-haze-ultra.frag , but instead of creating the 
 dot position and radius randomly, the routine would just create a rotation 
 angle randomly. I believe this would improve city and agriculture, but for 
 this to really work, the 'random' buildings and trees would have to be 
 shifted by the same function - probaby at placement time.

 Would it be technically hard to design the system in such a way that this 
 could be introduced? I don't have a function ready yet, but it's something I 
 wanted to give a try at some point with running a distinct shader for 
 'random' and 'civilized' terrain which needs different types of overlay.

At the moment, we use a shader instantiate the buildings and forests
to the correct locations.  That transformation could be made more
complicated to allow for texture rotation.  Where it would have more
difficulty is in handling the  random objects, which are masked as
well and would need to be moved.

It would also be a bit tricky to make the edges of each coordinate
cell look.  At the moment, the textures edges tile nicely.

I guess we could mirror the translation in the C-code, but it feels a bit wrong.

On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
 Stuart, this is totally unrelated, but what would be the price to pay to have
 collision with generated buildings, and Rembrandt shadows?

Actually, this isn't completely unrelated...

The original random buildings implementation (2.8.0) use basic OSG
primitives, and so had collision detection and Rembrandt shadows for
free.  In  2.10.0 this was changed to a shader-based instance
approach based on the tree scheme to reduce the memory footprint which
was ridiculously high in places like LA or Tehran.

With the shader-based approach, collision detection isn't possible as
the building doesn't really exist in the scenegraph.  Rembrandt should
be possible at the cost of running another shader IIRC.  I think I had
Rembrandt working for trees, but the cost was absolutely huge.

Now, the basic OSG primitive approach has some advantages:
- doesn't rely on shader support
- allows for more variety in the buildings as one isn't instantiating
a small set of buildings multiple times.
- the code is simpler
- more flexibility in adding complicated buildings such as signage, extensions.

If I implement a PagedLOD approach, it might reduce the memory
footprint sufficiently that we could switch back to the OSG
primitives.

Now, all I need to do is find the time to code all of this up!.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-09-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
 I think one of the problems is that most of our objects have no concept of
 different LOD's. If we had objects with say 3 LOD, it would ease memory and
 graphics load. It should be possible to take an object and generate multiple
 LOD's for it automatically, but I have almost no knowledge about 3D objects.
 Might be worth checking it out.

While a good LoD system helps with graphics load, it doesn't help with overall
memory load (unless it's a PagedLOD), which was the problem with the buildings.

We have fairly good LoD solutions for both trees and buildings to help with the
graphics loads.  For example we display the large buildings are
further range than the
medium or small.  Hopefully people never notice it because it's quite subtle.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Updated 707

2013-09-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Stuart Buchanan  wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 8:34 AM, James Turner wrote:
 Given that Innis has given the all-clear, what is the next step? I'm happy
 to simply checkout a particular branch from the repo above and commit the
 files to fgdata, but there are other options.

 Not sure what the other options are, but a simple checkout and commit
 to fgdata would be straightforward :).

This is now checked into git, with the non-GPL sounds removed.

Possible candidate for default aircraft for V3.0?

Enjoy!

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-09-18 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

This is to give a heads up on some changes that I'm planning for
Random Buildings for the V3.0 release, and to allow for
comments/suggestions/ideas.

In 2.12.0 the algorithm for the placement of random buildings is a
rather scattergun approach.  materials.xml sets a building density
(amongst other building attributes) which is used to generate a number
of random points on each triangle that makes up the scenery.

These random points are checked against a mask to ensure they aren't
being placed in the middle of roads, and then rotated to the correct
orientation to match the texture (using the red channel of the mask).

This broadly works, but the placement is fairly unrealistic:
- The mask is quite broad, and some buildings quite large, so they can
still stick out into the roads, and generally don't line right up
against the street.
- The spacing of buildings has to be quite conservative.

So, in V3.0 I plan to change this. Instead of using a scatter-gun
approach to placement and a mask, random building location will be
read directly from the mask, defined by a single pixel.  The color
(actually blue value from 0-255) will define the size of building
(small medium, large), and the red channel the rotation.

So instead of a material designer blocking out a large area for random
buildings to be placed within, they will define the specific location
for each random building.

Creating masks is going to require quite a bit more work in the new
world, but the end result should be better.

There is an open question of how to handle random object placement,
which also use the blue channel of the object mask:

-  For areas that don't use random buildings, I'm tempted just to
leave it as-is for the moment, as it reduces the number of object
masks that need to be re-created.

- For areas with both random buildings and random objects I'm planning
to make groups of objects to specific blue values.  So, a blue value
of 234 might equate to placing a silo or a farmhouse, while a blue
value of 233 might place a church, or tower block.  The mapping will
be defined in the materials.xml file.

Command, questions and offers of help to update some object masks are
all welcome :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Upcoming Random Buildings changes

2013-09-18 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 4:45 PM, James Turner wrote:
 It would really help memory use if we could defer tree/object/building
 generation until the tile is close to the viewer. Right now you generate
 lots of LOD nodes so we don't pay the rendering cost for distant tiles, but
 we're still paying a memory cost and loading time hit.

I did take a look at the PagedLOD approach - Matthias' code made a great
template to work from.

One thing I wasn't clear on is whether this would move generation of the
trees/objects/buildings from a scenery loading thread into some other
thread.  I'm not sufficiently familiar with our threading to know if there
would be any impact.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] fgelev

2013-09-17 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Tom,

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 8:24 PM, Thomas Albrecht wrote:
 Hi,

 can someone (Mathias?) please enlighten me about fgelev usage? Skimming 
 through the source, I understand that I need to provide --fg-root and 
 --fg-scenery, but how do I specify which location to probe?

I had a quick look at a perl script I wrote a while back to use fgelev:

my $elev = `echo 1 -$lon $lat | fgelev --fg-scenery
/home/stuart/FlightGear/Scenery/TerraSync --fg-root
/home/stuart/FlightGear/data`;

I did a quick test, and the first element appears to be an label so
the input format is

label lon lat\n

Then the output is

label: elevation

You can enter multiple entries on separate lines, and then finish with a Ctrl-D.

Hope that helps.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Textures separation, cleanup

2013-09-17 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi James,

On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 9:56 PM, James Turner wrote:
 Hello,

 For the next release (3.0, I think), I want to reduce the size of the 
 installers by making parts of the base package optional. Some are easy, like 
 AI Traffic and ATC chatter - the first time you enable that feature, we'll 
 download (well, terra-sync, really) the relevant files. If you don't use the 
 feature, you don't download the files ever.

 One large piece (480MB of the base package / fgdata at current counting) is 
 the Textures and Textures.high directories. Originally I believe 
 Textures.high was a partial subset of Textures, at higher resolutions, but 
 that's no longer the case (nor has it been for a long time, I think)
snip
 Any hints on how the mechanism is currently working, and how it could work in 
 the future would be interesting. This is a 'look at in the next few months' 
 task, not something I'm planning to tackle next week, so there is no rush. 
 Indeed, if it turns out to be more complex than I realise, it might even be 
 too big to tackle for 3.0, but the first step is to understand how it does 
 work, and how it could work :)

As I'm sure you're aware, most of the space is taken up by
Textures[.high]/Terrain

The files there should be exclusively used by our terrain definitions
under Materials/ - or at least I've made no attempt to keep them
consistent for other uses!

The actual textures are referenced in the various .xml files under
Materials/.  The code to do so is in simgear/scene/material/mat.cxx
(read_properties).  It's pretty basic - looking for a Textures.high
variant of the file first, then falling back to a Textures/ directory
if it doesn't exist.

However, in most cases the textures under Textures/ are very low rez
indeed - 256x256. That's a texture typically covering  2kmx2km, so a
resolution of 8m/px.  I'd be surprised if anyone is deleting the
Textures.high directory these days and falling back on them. Note that
the files with a mask.[png|dss] are used for object/vegetation
placement and are typically low resolution and only in the
Textures/Terrain directory.

The Textures.high versions are typically 1024x1024 or 2048x2048.

Perhaps we could replace the Textures/Terrain with the 1024x1024
versions?  That doesn't save us much space overall, but would make
having Textures.high optional a more reasonable option.

Note that the dds textures are referenced explicitly by a separate
Materails/dds/materials.xml file, so an alternative would be to make
some of the different materials.xml/Texture combinations as separate
packages.  I.e. package the basic materials (base/materials.xml and
default/materials.xml) in the base package, then make the
dds/materials.xml and regions/materials.xml and the textures that only
they reference separate.  I don't know how much a difference that
would make for the non-dds textures though as there's a lot of
overlap.

Finally, one of the things on my TODO list is improve the organization
of the materials definitions. At the moment it's a bit of a mess,
relying on a single massive list of materials definitions using
condition blocks on each one.  I'd like to provide mode structure so
we can have more sensible separate definitions.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Howto download aircraft ( and others data ) from Git

2013-09-03 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Alan,

On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Alan Teederwrote:
 Not everyone lives in a big city with fast broadband and the powers that be
 seem to bury their heads in the sand when the topic is bought up - as it has
 been and will be – again and again and again.

Can I refer you to Jame Turner's posts at 2:28pm and 5:37pm indicating that
he is planning to address this for V3.0 at the end of the year?  I may have got
lost in the other comments.

Unfortunately this is a difficult problem to solve without nasty side-effects.
Fortunately we have people like James to do so :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Release candidates

2013-08-31 Thread Stuart Buchanan
 On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 1) Windows launcher appears to have Rembrandt enabled by default, but set
 via the Advanced properties, rather than having a checkbox on the launcher.
 Makes it quite difficult for a new user to disable it.  I would have expected
 Rembrandt to be switched off by default and with a checkbox on the
 Rendering Options section of the launcher to enable it. Caveat: It's possible
 that I've lost a config file somewhere on my Windows system, so if someone
 else could verify this is the case, that would be great.

On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 10:04 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I've checked RC1 - FGRun here - AFAIKS it just picks up whatever you had
 last set in Advanced/Properties - I had Rembrandt disabled and that's what I
 got.

Ah good - I suspected that might be the case but couldn't work out
where the config
was being stored.

 2) There appears to be some invalid scenery around lat:37.228, lon:-121.9703.
 Scenery triangles are white and the UFO can't determine the material type.
 I'll investigate this further - might be an error in the landclass or 
 something
 we've got wrong in materials.xml.

This looks just like a straight terrain build error.

The problem appears to be in bucket 958408.

Here's the screenshot, just using the terrain in data/Scenery:

http://www.nanjika.co.uk/flightgear/fgfs-screen-057.png

Here's the equivalent using current terrasync data, which matches what
the mapserver
is showing as the data:

http://www.nanjika.co.uk/flightgear/fgfs-screen-058.png

According to the UFO, the forested terrain for terrasync between the
river and the road
is one of Landmass, SomeSort, Island, Default, which is slightly
suspicious.  However, it isn't
just that terrain that is missing, as the lake and the town are also
not rendered which makes
me think this is just a build error.

I vaguelly recall that the scenery delivered with the base package is
a special case and
not simply a copy off the standard world scenery build.  Can anyone
comment if this
is so, or whether we should over-write the base scenery with terrasync as a fix?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-08-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
 Don't have much time today for further troubleshooting unfortunately; should
 have some after my last exam tomorrow ;-)

Hi Gijs,

Have you had the chance to look at this at all, and did Geoff's
suggestion help?  Do we have any active Win developers around who can
help fix this?

On a related note, once the build problem is resolved, could we
generate a full installation RC package for testing?  It would make it
easier for testers not familiar with Git to use it, and would be quite
handy for people like myself who do their development on Linux, but
have Windows systems available for testing but without the git
infrastructure or the time to download the entire git fgdata
repository.

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-08-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 3:51 PM, James Turner wrote:
 On a related note, once the build problem is resolved, could we
 generate a full installation RC package for testing?  It would make it
 easier for testers not familiar with Git to use it, and would be quite
 handy for people like myself who do their development on Linux, but
 have Windows systems available for testing but without the git
 infrastructure or the time to download the entire git fgdata
 repository.


 Once the build is fixed, Jenkins should do exactly that - that's part of the
 automation work I did for 2.10 - Jenkins will produce the complete install
 EXE, someone just has to grab it from Jenkins and upload / mirror / seed it
 as they see fit.

That's great work,

Now all we need is someone with enough Windows knowledge to fix the
build.

 [1] 'where there's smoke there's fire', this is old terminology from the
 Netscape/Mozilla TinderBox engine.

I'm pretty sure the smoke test predates Tinderbox.  I came across it
when working for Xilinx in reference to hardware testing where the first
test is to attach a power feed and check that nothing started giving off
smoke :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Updated 707

2013-08-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 8:34 AM, James Turner wrote:
 Given that Innis has given the all-clear, what is the next step? I'm happy
 to simply checkout a particular branch from the repo above and commit the
 files to fgdata, but there are other options.

Not sure what the other options are, but a simple checkout and commit
to fgdata would be straightforward :).

However, Marc wasn't sure whether some of his audio files were GPL
compatible, so I think we need to wait for him to remove them before
proceeding.  Marc - Is that OK ?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Some Help

2013-08-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Ante,

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Ante Cugura wrote:
 I have recently downloaded FlightGear, and am enjoying it, but I seem not be
 able to download some aircraft. Even when the program says I have downloaded
 the aircraft correctly, when I go to use the aircraft, it comes up with a
 small blue and yellow plane. Also, with the plane which do successfully
 download, I am not able to get it in the livery which I want, even when it
 says that I can get it on your website.

  I use a MacBook Air laptop, and it would be greatly appreciated if you were
 able to provide some help.

How are you running the simulator?  From the command line or from a launcher?

if you are running from the command-line, can you post your command-line here?

Unfortunately I don't run a Mac myself, so I may not be able to
provide very specific
help on this.  You might want to post to the FlightGear forums
(http://www.flightgear.org/forums/) where there may be more people who can help.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Updated 707

2013-08-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

Marc Kraus (CC'd as he's not on the -devel list) has produced a (very)
significant update to the 707, a model that Innis Cunningham developed
a number of years back.

It's available from http://gitorious.org/boeing/707 and is well worth
a look, particularly for the fine cockpit and engineer station with
extensive start-up tutorial.

Marc has asked if it would be OK to replace the existing 707 with this new one.

Innis (if you're around) - are you OK with this?  If Innis is not
around, does anyone have any problems with adding this?

If replying - please Reply-All to include Marc in this discussion,

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-08-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Pat,

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Pat  wrote:
 One reschedule is a good idea.  Would an indefinite delay, with a
 promise republishing the schedule by a given date be appropriate or
 desirable?

An indefinite delay would risk the release never being completed,
and we'd be back where we were before with big gaps between releases.
A defined delay gives us all something to aim for :)

Plus we want to get this release completed so we can start on the
Christmas release, tentatively named 3.0.0.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-08-13 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 Permission granted ;-)

 As everybody seems to be caught in some real life trouble, I can't see a
 better way to get the release out than delaying it for a while.

 Would two weeks be enough for everybody? That will get us to the weekend
 Aug, 31/Sep 1.

I propose pushing out the release by a month. I've got a bit more time available
for FG right now, but not as much as I did 12 months ago, and it sounds like
James and Thorsten R are similarly time limited.  I think it will take
longer than usual to address any issues found in the RCs.

If we are going to slip the release, we should only do so once :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-07-30 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi James,

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 10:07 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 As an FYI, I'm still working on some final updates to The Manual that
 I want to get committed to the 2.12.0 branch.

These have now been committed to master (e87379c).

James - if it's convenient could you pull this to the 2.12.0 release
branch please.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.12 is branched

2013-07-24 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 8:38 PM, James Turner wrote:
 Hi,

 I've just created the release branches for FG, SG  data (at Torsten's 
 request, since he's on holiday in the wild, Internet-less north of Sweden).

Thanks James.

As an FYI, I'm still working on some final updates to The Manual that
I want to get committed to the 2.12.0 branch.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Changelog 2.12

2013-07-17 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Gijs de Rooy  wrote:
 Hi Stuart,

 thanks for the improvements! Checking the diff I do wonder if you removed
 the Microsoft SideWinder Precision Racing Wheel (rudder) pedals line on
 purpose? Vivian added this one in March...

 https://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/commit/9dcb78c2248

Good spot.  That was a mistake.  Now corrected.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 Ah, that's my mistake.

 To avoid .git files corrupting each other, I downloaded your new version as a
 tarball from gitorious and then copied it over the existing aircraft.
 Of course,
 that wouldn't have deleted the removed files.

 I'll do another clean up when I get a chance over the weekend.  No problem.

This is now done.  Apologies to future generations for the mess in the git logs!

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Changelog 2.12

2013-07-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

I've just taken a trawl through the git logs to find the major
enhancements from the last 6 months, the results of which are now in
the Changelog:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Changelog_2.12

Comments welcome, particularly on what should be mentioned in the
highlights section at the end of the first paragraph:

The FlightGear development team is happy to announce the v2.12
release of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This
new version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and
bugfixes. Highlights in this release include improved usability,
continued development of the Canvas rendering toolkit, and improved
scenery rendering. 

I'd also like suggestions of other new or majorly improved aircraft
that have had particular updates over the last 6 months.

I'm also not sure whether or not we should include tooltips in the
feature list.  They are currently switched off by default in
preferences.xml and can only be switched on from within the Debug
menu. James - are they now mature enough that we should switched them
on by default?

On a related note there's also the question of the mouse modes to
consider.  I no-longer use the old-style mouse modes, instead using
the right-click-to-pan-view mode instead.  Should that be available
through the GUI (in which case I've got to re-write various parts of
The Manua)

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 12:52 PM, grtuxhangar team wrote:
 Hello,Stuart

 Sorry for the huge mistake, thank a lot for the fix, and the time you spent
 on it.
 However, when looking at the
 http://www.gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/trees/master/Aircraft/F-8E-Crusader
 and
 http://www.gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/trees/master/Aircraft/PBY-Catalina
 I notice there is a lot of old outdated files which are longer there (
 especially textures.rgb  files ).
 Our updated versions within the https://gitorious.org/eekpo, do not contains
 these old files.

Ah, that's my mistake.

To avoid .git files corrupting each other, I downloaded your new version as a
tarball from gitorious and then copied it over the existing aircraft.
Of course,
that wouldn't have deleted the removed files.

I'll do another clean up when I get a chance over the weekend.  No problem.

 The process we are working with are surely wrong  to you.
 When we are working on updates what is the best way  to help you ?
  How could we help you to synchronize those updates within fgdata. ?

A merge request to fgdata would be easier for me to handle, but that would
mean you have to download the full fgdata.

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:40 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
 What I always do when I get update packages instead of merge requests is to
 delete the aircraft locally (not in Git) and then add the new package. That
 way you will clearly see all deleted files, renamed case-insensitive files
 etc.

Good tip!  I'll try to remember to do that next time.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-11 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Ahmad,

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:30 PM, grtuxhangar team wrote:
 Hello,  Stuart ,

 Thank for your kind effort about it.
 Since we have again uploaded a new version within our Git Project
 https://gitorious.org/~eekpo, and since we can't check the actual content of
 your official fgdata Aircraft directory  ( like said  we don't have any high
 speed communication line so  too much large for downloading ,), it could be
 better to update both aircraft with the entire content from:

 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/f-8e-crusader.git
 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/pby-catalina.git

 Sorry for the difficulty that we are introducing there , as long as the
 fgdata is not split in part with individual aircraft ( there was a project,
 is it given up ? ), we can't  be helpful.

I've committed the latest set of changes.

I made a couple of small corrections to the PBY-Catalina in passing
as there were some references to Aircraft/PBY6_Catalina that needed to be
changed to Aircraft/PBY-Catalina

Thanks again for your contributions.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-07-08 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Guys,

A 30 second  thought on this:

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 10:58 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
 Once we clear past the 2.10, 2.12, etc. series, I'd like to go back to
 keeping things single digits in the major and minor version numbers and when
 we run out of a single digits bump up the major number (so 3.8.x - 4.0.x).
 Number are numbers, but this one confused a lot more people than I expected
 it would or should so maybe it's good to be sensitive to that after we clear
 the 2.x series of versions.

That sounds OK to me, as it would imply a full release every 2.5
years, give a clear
flag ahead of time when we're nearing a major release, and save having these
discussions in the future.  For reference, with the current plan there
will be 4 years
between 2.0.0 (Feb 2010) was and 3.0.0 (Feb 2014).

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-08 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Ahmad,

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 2:28 AM, grtuxhangar team wrote:
 Hello,
 Crusader:
 After check out , we have found some other mistake, landing gear and
 catapult related.
 =The landing gear did not behave correctly on water ( it should not take
 any water solid ).
 =The catapult force was too weak.
 the
  F-8E-Crusader/Systems/landing-gear.xml
 and
 F-8E-Crusader/Systems/catapult_free.xml
 are updated

 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/f-8e-crusader

 Catalina:
 Same error than Crusader  landing gear against water ( only the sea was
 right )
 It want also an update
 PBY-Catalina/Systems/landing-gear.xml

 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/pby-catalina.git

 Sorry for that huge noise.

Thanks for letting me know about the updates, and sorry for the late response.

I should be able to look at these later this week.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-03 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 1:20 PM, grtuxhangar team wrote:
 Hello,

 Back to the topic, since it was not a bug our models related, but only an
 FG/OSG  consistency issue, you  may update fgdata/Aircraft/F-8E-Crusader
 and fgdata/Aircraft/PBY-Catalina, both should be right with the coming FG
 2.12 .


 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/f-8e-crusader.git
 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/pby-catalina.git

 Thank for the FG Fix

Hi Ahmad,

These aircraft have now been committed to fgdata.

Thanks very much for your work.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-07-03 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 10:55 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
 It can be useful to remove
 F-8E-Crusader/Models/Textures-hires/texture12F/afterburn.png   ( which is
 less eye candy ).

 Done. Thanks!

Thanks for spotting and sorting this out Gijs.

I missed it in my review.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] some models updates available

2013-06-26 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Ahmad,

On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 3:06 PM, grtuxhangar team wrote:
 Hello,

 One of our  member within our grthteam has been working on updates gpl
 compliant regarding some old models which were done by Gérard many years
 ago.
 You may find these models updated at
 https://gitorious.org/eekpo

snip

 you may  get them with
 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/f-8e-crusader.git
 git clone g...@gitorious.org:eekpo/pby-catalina.git

I was planning to merge these into fgdata this evening, but they
appear to have been
deleted last night.

Are you planning to re-release them?

If so, please let me know so I can get them into fgdata.  It would be
great to have
both these aircraft updated for the 2.10.0 release.

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-06-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 Collecting the arguments from this discusson, I can see good points for
 a 3.0.0 release. Most convincing was Stuarts comparison against 2.0.0
 and the progress we made since that version.

 My suggestion is, we dare to call the 2013 summer edition FlightGear
 3.0.0 and we bump the version number later this week.

 I'll leave that discussion open for a few days and hope we can agree on
 the new number.

Having thought about this a bit more I'm going to propose we do 2.12.0 now and
pre-announce 3.0 as the Feb 2014 release to give us just a little more time
to prepare and make the 3.0 as polished as possible.  After all, it'll
be the third
major release in 15 years :) .

We currently have about 3 weeks before the release branches are cut,
and we'll have
some 7 weeks for bug hunting.  For a 2.12.0 release, that's business as usual,
but I can imagine that many aircraft developers in particular would
want to perform
some extra TLC before a major release.  Externally, 3.0 is going to be
considered
a bigger deal than 2.12.0.

Declaring that the Feb 2014 release will be 3.0 now will give everyone plenty of
notice, and might encourage efforts to fix bugs in the next 6 months.  I'm aware
that my FG development time is more limited these days, and given activity on
this list I suspect I'm not alone, so this time might be quite useful.

Whatever way we go, I suggest that we zero-pad the minor release digit
after 3.0.0
so we have 3.02, 3.04 etc. to reduce confusion if we reach double digits.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-06-24 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 - ALS now works much better with the random trees.  I think
 there's still work to be done with other shaders (presumably
 the wake shader has still to be ported?)

 Yes (if that is really a major holdup, I can probably do this within the next 
 weeks if it makes Vivian smile :-) ...).

I don't think it's a major hold-up, but it would be nice to get it resolved.

 A more significant problem in my view are the lights which apparently don't 
 go via any shader, so they fog wrongly, and the visibility of the sun below 
 the skydome-drawn horizon or through dense fog - from Fred's answer I gather 
 that they would require some source code work.

Ah yes.  I remember you mentioning this before, me saying I'd add it
to my TODO list, and then failing to do so.  Sorry.  I've now added it
to my wiki TODO list so I don't forget again.  Are you thinking about
the sprinkling of lights that we put over the terrain, the VASI/PAPI
lights, or the approach lights.  Or all three?  :)

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Rembrandt Investigations

2013-06-24 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

I spent a little time this weekend looking through the Rembrandt
shader code to gain some familiarity and (naively) see if I could find
any obvious performance improvement, in particular by unwrapping
loops/if tests, as Rembrandt is just a little too slow on my machine
to be usable.

Unfortunately most of my efforts actually made things worse, often by
a factor of 2.  Evidently modern GPU GLSL compilers are more advanced
than I had thought, and I should be a little more humble in the
future!

However, I did notice a couple of things I'd like to get comments on,
mainly from Fred I suspect.

1) Shaders/ssao.frag:  This is the fragment shader for Ambient
Occlusion.   Line 54 starts a FOR loop that only executes once. I
don't know enough about the shader to say whether it's a straight bug
and should execute 4 times, or whether it's correct and the FOR loop
can be removed. Can anyone confirm?

2) Shaders/sunlight.frag:  I think I can remove the if() tests at the
end of the shader (around line 95), so

   float cosAngIncidence = clamp(dot(normal, lightDir), 0.0, 1.0);
float blinnTerm = clamp( dot( halfDir, normal ), 0.0, 1.0 );

if (cosAngIncidence  0.0)
Ispec = pow( blinnTerm, spec_emis.y * 128.0 ) * spec_emis.x *
fg_SunSpecularColor.rgb;

float matID = texture2D( color_tex, coords ).a * 255.0;
if (matID = 254.0)
Idiff += Ispec * spec_emis.x;

can be replaced with the following code:


float blinnTerm = clamp( dot( halfDir, normal ), 0.0, 1.0 );
Ispec = step(0.0, dot(normal, lightDir)) *  pow( blinnTerm,
spec_emis.y * 128.0 ) * spec_emis.x * fg_SunSpecularColor.rgb;
Idiff += step(0.996, texture2D( color_tex, coords ).a) * Ispec
* spec_emis.x; // 254: Water, 255: Ubershader

This doesn't improve the performance on my machine by a significant
amount, but it would seem worth doing.

3) From reading Effects/sunlight.eff, I don't think sunlight.frag is
ever executed with filtering == 1, (that's what
sunlight-nofiltering.frag is for), so the if() test on line  70 can be
removed.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-06-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 9:29 PM, James Turner wrote:
 Emilian has explained on IRC this might be due to the out-of-the-box /
 default config for Rembrandt being highly suboptimal, which I didn't yet
 evaluate, I would be delighted to have it more usable. I'm going to test
 further over the weekend.

BTW, from a quick look at the relevant shaders, there are a couple of if
 tests that might be worth factoring out if possible:

gbuffer-functions.frag: 64
gbuffer-encode.frag: 21

Both of these seems to be related to a configuration property uniform,
and I wonder if the if() test itself is having significant cost.

Like you and Thorsten, I see a very significant drop (50%) in frame-rate
with Rembrandt, even without most the nice features such as shadows which
has put me off using it.  I had thought it was just because my box is now
underpowered (the march of technology) but it sounds like other are
seeing similar issues and it would be worth some further investigation.

I'll have a play over the weekend when I get the chance.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-06-19 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:08 PM, Kleo G. wrote:
 ALS already has an ON/OFF selection button.

 Wouldn't it be useful for Rembrandt to also have such a button, thus being
 able to switch it on or off either without restarting the sim??
 It would skip all the inconvenience of restarting the sim for activating
 Rembrandt.

Hi Kleo,

I don't think that is possible, as Rembrandt requires a particular
graphics pipeline
to be set up that can only be done at startup.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] reminder: entering feature freeze now

2013-06-19 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 What version number will we give to the new
 release? Are we ready for a 3.0 or is it 2.12?

 Looking through my list of goals for the last coding period:

I also had a look through the 3.0 backlog article
(http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_3.0_backlog), and I was
pleasantly surprised at what I was able to tick off:

- We now have a unified weather UI that is much more
usable.  Thanks to Vivian for his help on this.
- ALS is now integrated with Basic Weather.  While it can't
leverage all the features that ALS provides, it's good enough
that IMO we have now managed to make the rendering
model and weather models independent.
- ALS now works much better with the random trees.  I think
there's still work to be done with other shaders (presumably
the wake shader has still to be ported?)

So, I think we've managed to polish many of the rough edges,
which is good.

Vivian wrote:
 A nice list and it's all worthwhile improvement, but it's all tinkering
 around the edges of existing stuff. There's no step change which would
 justify 3.0 IMO. For that we need something major, like new terrain (850) or
 Rembrandt as the default.

Perhaps we should instead look at 2.0.0 as the baseline rather than 2.10.0 and
think in terms of the maturity of the features added since that point.

With a 6 month release cycle, it's extremely unlikely we'll suddenly have a new
feature spring fully-formed in a release - instead we'll have experimental
features mature over a period of releases as we've seen with Rembrandt, canvas,
ALS.

For example, ALS is now pretty mature, and in general our eye-candy has moved
on significantly from 2.0.0 (object masking, random buildings,
regional textures etc.)

Perhaps we should do the work required to make ALS the default, and
declare that 3.0?

It's not a completely facetious question. I've been wondering whether we should
deprecate the standard rendering model (non-ALS, non-Rembrand), and instead
have ALS as the default, with a modification so that the lowest
quality level matches
the lowest quality level of the standard model.  Obviously we'd need to do some
work to port any remaining standard rendering model features (wake shader?)
across.

At higher quality levels, I don't think that the standard model is as
developed or
mature for terrain in particular, and some of the features such as the urban
shader have been rendered (pun intended) obsolete by other developments.

That would simplify matter from a user perspective, and make it easier
for them to achieve graphics similar to the screenshots we publicize.

Of course, that is a completely different approach to non-OSS software
development,
were the X.0.0 release is a bug-ridden mess and the point releases
improve quality. :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] trees

2013-06-18 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Vivian Meazza  wrote:
 Syd,
 We fixed that bug a while back, I hope J. Could you rebuild with the latest
 FG/SG and try again with the latest FGDATA? I really hope that fixes it!

Me too!

Syd - if it doesn't fix it, can you let me know the following:

1) Are you seeing this for all forested areas (e.g. around KHAF)?  Or is this
specific to explicitly placed trees in the scenery?

2) Any errors on the console?

3) What rendering settings do you have?

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] suggest: divide getstart each language

2013-06-17 Thread Stuart Buchanan
HI Kiyohito,

Thanks for your interest in the manual.

We made the decision to keep the manual as a single set of source
files with blocks for each language so that the different translations
staying in sync and to make it easy for translators to update a single
section at a time.

Otherwise, it's too easy for the Finnish translation to be out of date
relative to the English version when the latter is updated with the
latest menus.

We didn't consider machine-assisted translation at the time, though
OmegaT looks like a very useful tool.

However, if someone is motivated enough to provide a complete
translation of existing manual in a given language, I'm sure we can
find someone motivated enough to convert it to the existing format if
required.

-Stuart



On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 10:38 AM, K.Aoki
athlon64x2.windsor.6000p...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi All,
 Sorry, forget before my mail. That's mistake.


 I suggest that we divide getstart each language, reason: More easier
 to use Computer-assisted translation tool, e.g. OmegaT
 --

 My suggestion detailed are below. (example from preface.tex)

 now:
 getstart/source/*.tex
 [code]
   \iflanguage{english}{Did you ever want to fly a plane yourself,
 but lacked the money or ability to do so?...}{}
   \iflanguage{french}{N'avez-vous jamais voulu piloter un avion
 par vous-m\^{e}me, mais manqu\'{e} d'argent ou de comp\'{e}tences pour
 le faire ?...}{}
 [/code]


 future:
 getstart/source/en/*.tex
 [code]
   Did you ever want to fly a plane yourself, but lacked the money
 or ability to do so?...
 [/code]

 getstart/source/fr/*.tex
 [code]
   N'avez-vous jamais voulu piloter un avion par vous-m\^{e}me,
 mais manqu\'{e} d'argent ou de comp\'{e}tences pour le faire ?...
 [/code]

 --
 Kiyohito, AOKI

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-19 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I'm going to have one more attempt to fix the black hat in a square
 texture
 before looking into reducing the number of variations.

 Yup, works nicely here, there's definitely an improvement. I've also
 modified the predicates for techniques 4 and 9 take that into account

 I've also fixed the black hat by increasing the bleed margins in treebin.cxx
 a tad:

 t-push_back(Vec2(variety + 1.0f, 0.234f));
 t-push_back(Vec2(variety, 0.234f));

 I'm using the old square texture - that would need adjusting because those
 margins clip the top of the higher trees.

 All looking really good here now.

Thanks for the pointer.  I've committed a change using the reduced UV
coordinates, converted all the tree textures back to squares and ensured
they have an appropriate spacing at the top.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I'm rather surprised that you can't see the black outline around the trees.
 It's around all of them, but is more or less visible according to the range
 and angle of incidence. It is also the cause of the spike arising from the
 centre of the trees.

 The proximate cause of the black outline is
 alpha-to-coveragetrue/alpha-to-coverage. Commenting out techniques 4 and
 9 in the tree effect removes all black artefacts.

There's a bug in the predicate for technique 4.  It should only be enabled if
you have ARB_multisample, but is incorrectly being enabled if you have
shader language 2.  I've got a fix for this that I've still to push.
However, I think this issue
predates my recent tree changes, though they may have exacerbated
them.  Were you
seeing black borders around the trees before I started messing around
with them recently?

My system supports ARB_multisample, and IMO it provides quite a good effect at
normal tree viewing distances.  I'm slightly surprised that Thorsten's
new system doesn't
support this, as evidenced from his screenshots.

Interestingly, when I disable technique 4, I start seeing the black
outlines. Evidently there
some very GPU-specific things going on here.  On the plus side, I can
at least reproduce
the issue!

I _do_ have a good fix for the black outlines in general, and I've
modified the current
textures to use it.  I just need to push it - hopefully tonight.

 While alpha-to-coverage is
 intended for dense foliage or grass, I'm not sure that it is appropriate for
 our trees as presently drawn and textured. I think you are right to try to
 go back to the square texture. I hope that you can find a fix for this -

Unfortunately modifying the mipmap didn't help.  Partially disabling mipmaps
by setting nearest meant that trees in the medium-far distance look
very pixelated and
artificial, and I've been unable to get the mipmap alpha channel to work.

 know how difficult it is to fix a bug that you can't yourself see. In the
 meantime should we consider reverting to the previous scheme in fgdata while
 you come up with a fix? Here. I've adjusted the bleed margins and commented
 out the relevant techniques, which produces nice trees.

Let me check in the stuff I've done so far once I run a couple more
tests this evening.
That should fix the issues you are seeing.

However, that still leaves us with very long, thin, textures as I
can't see a way to go
back to the square textures without causing the black hats.

If we want to stay within a total texture size of 4096, the long, thin
texture limits us to
a maximum individual tree texture of 128x256, as there are now 32
textures in a typical
sheet (8 trees, each in summer, summer+snow, winter, winter+snow variants).

I think that a 128x256 texture for an individual tree isn't quite
enough.  While we don't need
to go bird-spotting, it's not unreasonable to expect the tree to look
good if it fills the screen.

So, I think we have the following options:

1) Forget the whole thing.  Revert back to the previous model of
having one texture
for summer and one for winter, no support for snow-covered trees.  I'd
still commit
changes to fix the black outlines and technique=4, so the effort won't
have been completely
wasted. With a 4096 texture sheet limit we'd be able to have 512x1024
individual trees.

2) Support dynamic changing of snow-cover on trees, but not season
changes.  This means
that to see a winter deciduous tree one would need to change the
season and reload the scenery,
loading in the winter material definitions which would include both
the tree texture and general
ground textures.  Thorsten R. - what are your plans for ALS support
for winter?  I
think you currently use the summer materials, correct?  This would
allow 256x512 individual trees.

3) Support dynamic changes of season, but have no support for
snow-cover on trees in the texture
itself.  This is my probably my preferred option. While having
snow-covered trees is nice, the
actual circumstances when it occurs are fairly minimal as the snow is
blown off the trees by the wind.
This would allow 256x512 individual trees.

4) Accept the limitation of 128x256 individual tree textures.

Let me know what you think.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] osm2city.py

2013-05-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 9:29 PM, Thomas Albrecht wrote:
 If I had a limited number of complex (as in  8 vertices per model) shared
 models, and place a total of 5 instances in a scene, could this be made to
 occupy significantly less RAM than 5 individual models?

In theory yes - that's what the SHARED verb on the .stg file is for.
The idea was to
only have one model loaded, and then place it multiple times in the scenegraph.

However, IIRC there was an issue with memory management in OSG which meant
that when a tile containing SHARED entries was unloaded, it caused
FG to churn for a while updating various pointer counters.  I don't
think this was
ever resolved, so currently each SHARED instance is loaded individually.

While this approach would reduce RAM usage, it would be at the expense of
frame-rate, as the 5 models would still each require OSG state change.

Sadly, nothing is for free :(.


-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 I'm slightly surprised that Thorsten's
 new system doesn't
 support this, as evidenced from his screenshots.

 glxinfo claims that it does - I get several instances of GL_ARB_multisample 
 or GLX_ARB_multisample shown in the resulting  list (at least under Linux, 
 maybe it's a bug in the Windows driver of the card only??? - I'll check next 
 time I
boot up Windows).

Someone pointed out to me off-list that there are other control
properties for multisampling, which I had set in my .fgfsrc file and
had forgotten about completely.  I've updated the effects file to
check for these.

I'd highly recommend setting them as I think they improve the visuals
on the vegetation significantly:

/sim/rendering/multi-sample-buffers=true
/sim/rendering/multi-samples=2

I've just checked in something that should fix both issues, along with
.xcf source files for the existing trees that shows how they should be
created, and a little perl script to generate .dds and low resolution
.pngs from a source .png file.

I'm going to have one more attempt to fix the black hat in a square
texture before looking into reducing the number of variations.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Vivian,

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
  That works - the hat artefact is gone. If I look very carefully I can see a
 vertical artefact emanating from the centre top of some trees.

 I hadn't realised that the high res texture was going to be quite so big.
 Texture sizes  4096 px are not so well supported.

 I wonder if you wouldn't be better disabling mipmapping for trees - it seems
 to be the source of all the problems? In particular, the different grazing
 angle on the crossing panels means that different mipmaps will be used.

I can't disable mipmapping AFAIK, but I spent some time looking at the effects
source code and found an undocumented (well, not in README.effects) option
to control how the mipmaps are generated for each of the RGB and alpha
channels.*

So, it would appear that I can generate a mipmap where the alpha value is taken
as the minimum of the surrounding pixels while the RGB values are
created normally.

I need to experiment some more with it later in the week, but I may have found a
way to use a more square texture without artifacts.  It should also
resolve the artifact
you mention above.

In passing I noticed that both your and some of Thorsten's screenshots
show a nasty
black outline around some of the trees.  I don't see that myself except,
but I've also got a fix for that issue.  As mentioned on the forum,
the problem is that the
completely transparent pixels have an RGB value of 0,0,0, so mipmaps
and interpolations
cause this to bleed into the surrounding edges.

-Stuart

* Kudos to Tim Moore for exposing this - who would have thought we
could control how
the mipmap of a texture is generated on a per-channel basis through XML? :)

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] osm2city.py

2013-05-13 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Tom,

On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 9:35 PM, Thomas Albrecht wrote:
 Dear list,
 in particular Stuart,

 please let me 'officially' announce my project osm2city.py [1,2] here. This 
 python script takes OSM floor plans and generates 3D buildings for use with 
 flightgear. I'm planning to develop this into a procedural city generator 
 which would take a street network and then reasonably places (random) 
 buildings. The ultimate goal is (obviously) to improve FG's representation of 
 cities.

 It's at a rather early stage, and for the moment I prefer python for quick 
 prototyping. BUT, I know quite some C/C++, and compile from latest GIT 
 sources regularly.  In the future, I'm definately willing to move this into 
 FG (in one form or another).

 Tom

 [1] http://wiki.flightgear.org/Osm2city.py
 [2] http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5t=19625


To echo what others have said - this looks fantastic, and a major step
forward from the autogen buildings that we have at present.  I look
forward to it making my work redundant!

Based on my experience with the random buildings I think that
pre-generating the buildings as you are doing at present is a better
approach than trying to do things at runtime.  There simply isn't
enough information available in the tile loader to run a complex
algorithm at run-time, and even if we could, my experience has been
that the perf impact is too great.  For example, we generate random
buildings on a per-triangle basis (which allows us to determine the
position on a plane and avoid an expensive height query). They cannot
overlap the edges of the current triangle, as we can't tell what the
terrain is on the other side of the triangle edge.  This means you can
see odd streets leading to vertices in the terrain mesh.  Very
distracting when you start spotting them...

As you mention on the wiki page, memory occupancy is a big issue.  The
original implementation of random buildings used OSG primitives to
generate a geometry for an entire tile at once.  IIRC that was around
10GB for the LA area, and I'd expect the more complex buildings you're
generating to need significantly more.  As the random buildings are
pretty simple I was later able to shoehorn them into a shader approach
and improve memory occupancy significantly, but I don't think that'll
work with the complexity of buildings you have.

Since then Matthias modified the tile loader with an LoD callback, so
that model aren't all loaded at the same time as the tile - only when
you get close to them.  That should help a bit, and might make the
memory cost palatable for large cities.

I think it would be worth having a discussion with the scenery DB
owners about this as part of the scenery DB, automatically generating
buildings as OSM data improves and/or the scenery shapefiles are
changed.

-Stuart

PS: There's a util in FG (fgelev IIRC) that provides a much easier way
to probe terrain elevation than running a Nasal script in FG.

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree images for texturing

2013-05-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 I have a series of tree photographs if anyone is interested in creating new 
 tree textures.

Hi Thorsten,

I'm certainly interested, so send them my way if no-one else has
already expressed an interest.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I can still see that hat on middle distance trees. The effect might be
 less though - hard to judge. It is certainly no worse.

 I think it would be worth trying to spread the images out on the texture so
 that you avoid bleed. I'm pretty sure that is what I'm seeing here.

OK, I've pushed a new fix for this that goes back to the old approach of having
all textures in a strip, and using clamping to avoid bleeding.

You'll need a new simgear and data pull.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Shader compile failure

2013-05-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 9:27 AM, James Turner wrote:
 On Mac 10.8, latest of nearly everything:

 NVIDIA Corporation
 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 OpenGL Engine
 2.1 NVIDIA-8.10.44 304.10.65f03
 1.20

 VERTEX glCompileShader /Users/jmt/FGFS/fgdata/Shaders/tree-haze.vert FAILED

 VERTEX Shader /Users/jmt/FGFS/fgdata/Shaders/tree-haze.vert infolog:
 ERROR: 0:89: '*' does not operate on 'float' and 'int'
 ERROR: 0:89: '*' does not operate on 'float' and 'int'

Should be fixed now.  Let me know if not - I don't see the warning on
my NVIDIA GT260M GPU.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] about fdm properties

2013-05-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Alan Teeder wrote:
 I think that you a right in assuming that the developers are not interested
 in the FDMs.
 I posted this a week ago
 http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=C6C640DA467C4D118C9A794C6A46D433%40AlanPCforum_name=flightgear-devel
 and have not seen a single comment.

 It exposes a serious problem in JSBSim which affects all Datcom users.

 Perhaps eye-candy and endless mud slinging about the merits of various
 renderers is a more interesting subject.

I think its more a reflection of the areas of expertise of the active
developer right now.

I have no academic aerodynamics background and haven't done physics
since high school.  I've
spent some time reading the MIT opencourseware on fluid dynamics but
certainly aren't
competent to comment on these sorts of issues.

In contrast I do have a degree in Computer Science which included modules on
graphics, so that's where I can sensibly express opinions.

I know that doesn't help at all with the particular issue...

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Syncing sim time

2013-05-09 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Jack,

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 3:57 PM,  Jack wrote:
 Thanks to Jan Comans I've been able to sync the 3D clouds across three 
 instances of fgfs running on a multi-core machine.  This, in turn, provides 
 for some very respectable frame rates of 40 to 50 fps per core with a three 
 projector system with older generation Nvidia boards ( GT430 and GT440 ) on a 
 64bit I5 machine.  The visuals will be just awesome once the collimated 
 display is completed later this year.

Could you (or Jan) share with us what changes you had to make to allow
synchronization across multiple instances?  I thought I'd added some
code a while back to make the pseudo-random number generator used
start with the same seed for a given 10 minute window to address this,
but was never in a position to test it myself.


-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] 2.10.1

2013-05-08 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:15 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I re-installed the Jenkins nightly Win build from yesterday – seems OK,
 although I have NOT done any extensive testing. I’m seeing regular crashes
 here from ALS and Rembrandt, but that’s nothing new.  I’m getting a number
 of errors on start-up; they seem harmless:

 Failed to create alias at
 /controls[0]/refuelling[0]/refuelling-drogues-pos-norm

 [0]. Source /sim[0]/multiplay[0]/generic[0]/float[2] is already aliasing
 another

 property.

 Failed to set alias to /controls/refuelling/refuelling-drogues-pos-norm

FYI, I don't think this is related to the AAR work I've done recently, and looks
like it might be aircraft specific.  What aircraft are you seeing this with?


 I would be more concerned over the state of the data. The reinstall has
 partly solved the Screenshot directory issue – it now uses the default
 Working Directory, but the gui input is still stuck. We have a small glitch
 with Stuart’s latest iteration of the Random Vegetation (aka trees) with
 what I think is probably a mipmapping issue.

I thought 2.10.1 data would be taken from 2.10.0, with commits cherry-picked?

If not, I'd suggest backing out that commit from the 2.10.1 data branch, as
it has a co-requisite simgear change, and as Vivian mentions still has
some issues.

I've been away for the last 5 days so haven't had the chance to look into
the tree problem further, but have a couple of ideas.  One option would be
to mirror the texture rows, so instead of looking like this:

^^^
^^^
^^^
^^^

It would be top-to-top and base-to-base:


^



That way is the mipmap UV isn't quite accurate, it would just include the
tree-top of the texture above, rather than the base.  This would certainly be
less noticeable.  The downside is that I think it would require adding an if()
test to the vertex shader, something I've been avoiding due to (unfounded?)
concerns about performance.

Or I might simply change the textures to a (very) long strip, so instead of
512x128 it would be 2048x128.  However that feels rather clunky, and might
not make good use of GPU memory.  Anyone with GPU experience care to
comment?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-05-01 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:50 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I'm using a very recent pull of fgdata with no local mods. The hat effect
 shows up from low angles in all material modes - regional/global/dds. It's
 most apparent at EGMH, but can also be seen at KSFO. At higher angles or if
 I zoom in it disappears from the closer trees - but, like you, I can still
 see it at longer ranges. The angle/range effect would suggest that it's a
 mipmap thing - perhaps try a bit more space around the trees in the texture?

I've just pushed a fix to simgear that reduces the height of the UV
mapping by 0.004.
Please let me know if this fixes the problem.  I expect that some
trees will have been
slightly trimmed by this.  I'll go through the textures and correct
them once you and
Thorsten confirm the issue is fixed.

Thanks for your patience.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Further enhancement to checklists - binding support

2013-05-01 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

I've just pushed a further enhancement to the checklist feature.

Aircraft authors may now add one or more binding elements to a checklist
item.  Conceptually, these are the actions that the user should execute
to complete the item.  The checklist GUI displays items with such binding
elements with an additional [] button.  Clicking on the button executes the
bindings, allowing the user to watch as the
computer/co-pilot/instructor executes
the checklist item.

The binding element is exactly as you would expect - so
property-assign, nasal etc. works.

Due to the power of Nasal and properties, this feature only required 13 lines
of code to write, most of which is displaying the button!

I'm planning to extend this function so that checklists with one or more
items containing a binding element can have an (optional) button
to execute the entire checklist.  I'm still thinking of how best to implement
this, as I think one would want a gap between each item.

I'd highlight the property-interpolate command which provides a very
convenient way to interpolate a property to a new value.  See
Docs/README.commands if (like me) you were unaware of this :).

I've updated the c172p checklists to use this feature, including some rather
cute interpolations of the throttle, mixture and trim controls.

Thanks to Hooray on the forum for suggesting this enhancement ages ago.

Feedback welcome as always.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-04-26 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 this tree movement code is wonderful - how could you possibly not implement 
 this?

Glad you like it.

It got stuck under a bunch of other stuff and forgotten about more
than anything else.

However, one reason I didn't spend more time on it was that it didn't
seem particularly useful from a sim perspective.  If found that to see
the effect at reason (30kt) winds you either need to be sitting on
the ground or at quite low altitude when your attention is elsewhere.

Also, the only time I recall seeing trees moving when flying myself
was during a circuit to land at the end of a cross-country flight when
the wind had picked up a lot and we wanted to get on the ground ASAP.
On this particular leg I was doing comms/nav so had a bit of time to
look around.  The pilot had the bar in a death-grip and was
concentrating very hard on keeping us right-side up, and I'm pretty
sure he didn't notice any tree movements :)

That said, I'm very happy for this to be added.  it is quite a neat effect.

 I've been looking out of the window, timing the movement of trees in our 
 forest, and I think the time constant should rather be 1.7-2.0 and the 
 amplitude about 2.5 times as large - all of which makes it more pronounced. 
 Then I cooked myself a nice tropical storm and went in low level in rain over 
 treetops - very very nice.

The constants were just guesses based on an evenings work with no
direct observation of reality.  However bear in mind that the same
constants would be used for both oaks and conifers, which I'd expect
to move different amounts.

 I think I'll be putting this in at high quality and see if I can't get some 
 wind movement of the hires noise to match the impression...

I look forward to it.

 Since I see it reliably, I could have a try how I can make it go away - I 
 think I understand how the tree shader works well enough...

Someone contacted me off-list to mention that this is a fairly well
known problem and that shrinking the UV mapping slightly (which I'll
need to do in the C-code) and ensuring a nice transparent border
around all the trees is the normal way to address this.

So, I don't think there's anything you or Vivian need to do here.  I
just need to spend an hour or so adjusting all the textures.  I'll
also write some better documentation on creating tree textures so
scenery modelers can created them right first time.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Atmospheric Light Scattering

2013-04-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Vivian,

I'm not going to address the high level debate, but I have some
specific comments.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I think a more general concern would be that we seem to be developing 3 or 4
 different Flightgears, in which different things work or not as the case
 might be:

 Rembrandt

 Basic weather/Advanced Weather

 Atmospheric  Light Scattering (ALS)

I've just put in some effort recently to ensure that Basic Weather can
take advantage of ALS properly.  So while we retain two weather models,
there's no longer a dependency of ALS on Advanced Weather.  So we're
moving in the right direction here.

I've also taken a bit of a look at merging Rembrandt and ALS, and I think
I understand the Rembrandt pipeline enough that I could add ALS to it.

I'm very keen to promote a more consistent experience so that new users
don't encounter confusing differences between alternative rendering schemes,
and I'm prepared to put time into making that happen.

I'll take a look at the wake shader if you want, but I supect you'd prefer me to
fix some of the other issues you raised below first :).

 Right now FG seems like a mess with lots of things which used to work
 (tm):

 Screenshot directory entry in the gui  doesn't work

 Ditto Terrasync directory

 Tree textures are misaligned (here anyway)

 Manual Weather Input.

 Effects as above.

 I know that this isn't all  to do with you -

Well, two of these at least are within my bailiwick (tree textures and manual
weather input).  Manual weather input is on my TODO list, and I'll address the
tree texture issue in the other thread.

I've not had any time to look at the screenshot/terrasync directory issue.  I
strongly suspect that I could fix it, but I only have so many hours in the day,
and as mentioned before am spread pretty thin.

Personally I think most of the active FG devs are currently very overstretched
in terms of the areas that they have ownership of, which is affecting how much
can actually be done.  Fundamentally we need more core devs.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-04-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 Definitely looks like it.   Could you provide some further details on
 this please:
 a) Where are you seeing this ?
 b) which materials file (dds ? regions? )
 c) Have you deleted the Textures.high file to use lower resolution
 textures?  The
 trees in the screenshot look even more blocky than normal.

 After fresh pull yesterday, I can confirm the issue.

 a) Caribbean and French Alps so far
 b) using regional definitions
 c) no - just tried out of the box

I spent some time last night trying to repro this without much
success.  There is an issue with the very nice Caribbean texture
(Textures.high/Trees/tropical-alt.png) which I've got a fix for, but
other than that The only time I saw anything like what Vivian and you
have reported is at very very long range where I can just make out a
hat if I look carefully enough.

This makes me think that this might be something to do with the way
that our graphics cards are generating the mipmaps.  Do either of you
see the same issue with dds textures?

I also went through all the tree textures to check that there weren't
overlaps on the boundaries, and in all cases except as noted above,
there's at least a 1 pixel gap above the top of the UV map.  I could
push a speculative fix setting the UV map for trees to a maximum
height of 0.24 rather than 0.25 and see if that makes a difference,
but it feels very much like a workaround.

Any other ideas would be most welcome, as at the moment I'm a bit
stumped as to how to fix this.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-04-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Curt,

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Curtis Olson  wrote:
 When I've seen the bits of pixels on the very edges of the transparent tree
 areas it has sure looked like a texture wrapping issue to me.  This is a
 flag you can turn on/off at least at the low level of opengl and I'm sure
 OSG would expose this.

I think you might be thinking of the UV clamping function?

Unfortunately the UV coordinates are something like

(0,0), (0.128, 0.0), (0.128, 0.25), (0.0, 0.25) and it's that top edge at y=0.25
which is the problem.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Atmospheric Light Scattering

2013-04-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 Right now FG seems like a mess with lots of things which used to work
 (tm):

 Screenshot directory entry in the gui  doesn't work

 Ditto Terrasync directory

 Tree textures are misaligned (here anyway)

 Manual Weather Input.

 Effects as above.

 I know that this isn't all  to do with you -

 Well, two of these at least are within my bailiwick (tree textures and manual
 weather input).  Manual weather input is on my TODO list, and I'll address the
 tree texture issue in the other thread.

I've just pushed a fix for the weather issue.  I found two bugs in it
which I've fixed,
but there may be more as it's quite a complex dialog.  FYI I'm also
planning to move
some of the buttons around a bit.  I think the changes you (vivian) made are
an improvement in terms of making the configuration options more understandable,
but I can improve the layout slightly I think.

AFAICT the screenshot directory entry in the GUI does work.  At least on my
system I can change the screenshot directory via the GUI and record screenshots
to the new directory.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:08 PM, James Turner wrote:
 I suspect both of these are my 'fault', but equally I was only made aware of
 the TerraSync one a few weeks ago, and the screenshot one, this is the first
 I've heard of it.

Well, the Terrasync was caused by adding an additional nasalopen block
at the top of the file, so the one at the bottom was ignored :)

snip
 In the particular case of the Terrasync path I am especially confused
 because it's not possible to change the terrasync path once fgfs is running,
 as never has been as far as I know; since we can't adjust scenery paths with
 restarting the sim. So, to re-iterate, the defect really needs to explain
 what the intended use-case was here, since I am clueless.

I've restored the previous behaviour which did allow one to set the directory.

However, on testing, you are absolutely correct - changing has no effect within
the current session.  I'll add a warning message to that effect to the
dialog.  I think
it's still useful to be able to set the directory within the sim, even
if you have to
restart.

I think I must have added this function under the mistaken impression that it
had some effect.  Whoops!

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-04-24 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 Oh, do you still have that somewhere? I would love to play with this 
 implemented in an optional  high-quality tree shader - I could probably also 
 add some grass movement by translating the grain texture or the hires noise 
 with time into the wind direction...

Fortunately I still have the vertex shader stashed away, but I've lost
the effect file.

I added additional uniforms to tree.vert:

uniform float osg_SimulationTime, WindE, WindN;

WindE and WindN are almost certainly /environment/wind-from-[east|north]-fps

I think osg_SimulationTime is built in.

The actual code to do the translations is this shear code, placed
between the rotation and placement in the correct location:

// Rotation of the generic quad to specific one for the tree.
  position.xy = vec2(dot(position.xy, vec2(cr, sr)), dot(position.xy,
vec2(-sr, cr)));

  // Shear by wind.  Note that this only applies to the top vertices
  // [top vert only] [time dependent movement]
  [seed so trees close together move together]
  position.x = position.x + position.z * (sin(osg_SimulationTime * 0.7
+ (gl_Color.x + gl_Color.y + gl_Color.z) * 0.01) + 1.0) * 0.001 *
WindN;
  position.y = position.y + position.z * (sin(osg_SimulationTime * 0.7
+ (gl_Color.x + gl_Color.y + gl_Color.z) * 0.01) + 1.0) * 0.001 *
WindE;

  // Move to correct location (stored in gl_Color)
  position = position + gl_Color.xyz;

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Tree issues

2013-04-23 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On 23 Apr 2013, at 07:22, Renk Thorsten thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi wrote:
 Stuart, is it possible to pass somehow the info what trees are deciduous? 
 I've done some testing, and I can selectively pick 'green' hue in the shader 
 and color-rotate these pixels to autumn colors, but this is not sensitive 
 enough to key on the difference between leaf and needle - if we had that, we 
 could have autumn colors in addition.

Yes. If we put the deciduous trees at the beginning of the texture strip I can 
pass through information on the fraction of trees that are deciduous as a 
uniform and you can compare the x texture coordinate against that. 

At most a couple of lines of c code. 


 
 Then fall and windy could be combined with particles (?) to simulate  
 wind blown leaves and dynamically painting the foliage part of the  
 texture with alpha to make leaves fall off on windy weather..? ;) Kinda  
 special case and maybe not worth the effort but might be quite awesome  
 jaw-dropper on the right moment.. ;-)
 
 Yes, let's forget about spending all the framerate for flight and do 
 realistic vegetation - trees and grass should also move in the wind :-) (I 
 like the idea in principle because it's just mad enough to be charming...) 

Actually, I had this working very nicely a couple of months ago - using a sine 
function on time multiplied by wind factor to shift the top texture coordinates 
so the top of the trees move.  I even had a nice larger scale effect to produce 
the sort of wave affect you see across the tree tops

However to be visible at normal ranges (500m+) the wind had to be absolutely 
howling and shifting the tree tops many meters, so it really didn't seem worth 
the  minor computational cost. 

-Stuart

 
 * Thorsten
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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Terrain self-shading

2013-04-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Apr 21, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 We seem to have slight misalignment in the tree texture:

 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57645542/fgfs-screen-004.png

Definitely looks like it.   Could you provide some further details on
this please:
a) Where are you seeing this ?
b) which materials file (dds ? regions? )
c) Have you deleted the Textures.high file to use lower resolution
textures?  The
trees in the screenshot look even more blocky than normal.

 Is having a single texture sheet the most efficient way of doing it? Just
 asking.

I think so.  The textures here are very small (512x512) so the
difference between
a 512x128 and a 512x512 texture would be miniscule while loading 4
textures rather
than 1 from disk might be significant.  IIRC Thorsten also did
some experiments and found that having additional textures references
in a shader
had a significant performance impact.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Terrain self-shading

2013-04-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 As it happens, I'm part way through a change that would allow varying
 snow- and leaf- cover without having to load different textures, so
 trees above the snowline could be snow covered while those below are
 not.  This will increase the size of the textures to 512x512, while an
 individual tree will remain on 128 pixels tall.

This is now checked in.

Tree foliage is now consistent with the experimental Season slide on
the Environment Setting dialog (deciduous trees shed their leaves towards
late autumn) and the snow line (trees above the snow-line have a small
covering of snow).

Of course, we really should only add snow cover to the trees if the snowfall
is recent and there isn't much wind, so perhaps we should just have
summer/winter variants and no snow-covered... to be discussed.

There are changes to both simgear and data for this change.  Picking up
one or other results in very odd looking trees :).

This retires the -summer.[png|dds] and -winter.[png|dds] variants, which
have been removed.  Those creating tree textures for regional project will
now need to follow the new format.  I'll update the next newsletter to ensure
that this information is distributed.

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 Just to be clear - if we had textures, this is something I would do the work
 for since I suggested it, I'm not expecting Stuart to do this for me :-) 
 (This is
 not to imply that I would object against Stuart giving a try, but as long as I
 can follow up an idea I like myself, I try not to fill someone else's to-do 
 list).

That's fine.

 So I would suggest to implement this as a high-quality option for those who
 have the hardware to crunch substantial fragment shaders and leave the
 current implementation as a fallback.

That sounds reasonable, though the current implementation has changed in
the meantime :).

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Improved Basic Weather integration with Atmospheric Light Scattering

2013-04-19 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:
 I still use basic weather with mp so that I get the same clouds in both
 clients - is this still the case?

The clouds are unchanged by this, though I don't think that you will get
the same clouds in MP on both clients unless they are started at the same time.

The only changes I made with this were to ensure that Basic Weather generates
the appropriate properties for the atmospheric shaders.

 Your most recent change seems to have broken the manual input gui here -
 sometimes it works, and sometimes the values revert to the default.

Hmmm, odd - I made the changes specifically to fix the manual input UI
that I thought
your Weather UI changes had broken!  :)

I suspect that you and I are using the UI in a different way and
there's something broken
in the (complex) UI logic.  I'll take a look over the weekend - sorry
for the inconvenience.

If you're able to nail down the specific actions that cause it to
fail, vs. the actions that
make it work that would be useful.

 We seem to have lost the ability to use /NIL as a METAR input - very useful
 during fdm development to remove weather effects. I'm not sure when this
 broke, I think it might have been something James did.

That shouldn't have been changed by anything I've done recently.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Improved Basic Weather integration with Atmospheric Light Scattering

2013-04-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

Having talked about it for months (years?)  I've finally written some
property rules that improve the integration of Basic Weather with the
Atmospheric shader.

In particular the skydome properties are now calculated using formulae
very similar to those of Advanced Weather so there's no need to set
rayleigh/mie/density properties directly, and appropriate levels of
ground haze are estimated based on the lowest cloud layer.

Some of the integration is quite basic, and there's plenty of room for
improvement in the Basic Weather METAR parsing to set up appropriate
visibility settings in particular.

Feedback welcome as always, though I suspect almost everyone these
days is using Advanced Weather...

This also removes another roadblock from possibly making the
atmospheric shader on by (non-Rembrandt) default.  Ooohhh,
controversial :)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Terrain self-shading (plain text)

2013-04-15 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On 15 Apr 2013, at 21:39, Thomas Albrecht wrote:
 Sorry for that HTML-crap. Here's the plain text again.

No problem. I'm writing this from an iPhone and have no idea  whether it's in 
plain text or not!

  Thorsten suggested [1] separating foilage and trunk; is this what you have 
 in mind?

At the moment I'm simply using 4 separate complete textures ; one for each 
combination of summer/winter and clear/snow-covered. 

So I 'just' need straight pictures from summer and winter. Snow-covered would 
be a bonus, though that can probably be added later. 

With that I can display different textures above and below the snowline with no 
computational impact (well, a couple of additions and multiplications at the 
vertex level plus an additional Uniform). On my system there's no impact to 
frame rates. 

I've still to look at Thorsten's idea in detail (my code predates that 
discussion) and don't expect to have the time to do so in the foreseeable 
future. 

I expect it to require additional texture lookup and some perlin noise at a 
minimum so the perf impact might be significant. 

That's not to say that the two approaches can't sit side by side.  

 I'm just waiting for the right weather to take pictures of the trunks -- and
 then of course, for the trees become green again -- but then I can provide hi-
 res tree textures.

That will be great. Thanks. 

-Stuart 
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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Terrain self-shading

2013-04-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 Downstream, to preserve the illusion of shadows, I've had to alter the tree 
 shader to purely ambient lighting based on sun angle above the horizon. But 
 that seems to be a good idea in general - not only is this cheapter to 
 compute, but also our tree sprites have flat suraces with a clear normal, so 
 they have very pronounced directional scattering - real trees have random 
 orientation of leaves and needles and a leaf can also transmit light, so I 
 think real trees have much weaker directional light scattering and isotropic 
 scattering is actually the better approximation.

No objection from me.  I've never been particularly happy with the
directional scatter on the trees, but haven't spent any time trying to
fix it.

On a related note, the thread highlights that our tree textures are
rather small, so our trees look quite blocky.  When I initially
implemented them, I think I just used the same texture sizes as the
existing tree models, so the trees are only 128 pixels tall in a
512x128 strip.

As it happens, I'm part way through a change that would allow varying
snow- and leaf- cover without having to load different textures, so
trees above the snowline could be snow covered while those below are
not.  This will increase the size of the textures to 512x512, while an
individual tree will remain on 128 pixels tall.

Given that we've got a very limited number of tree textures and the
same texture is used on a large number of objects, perhaps it would be
worthwhile increasing the resolution?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Improved usability

2013-04-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 6:01 PM, James Turner wrote:
 On 12 Apr 2013, at 16:56, James Turner zakal...@mac.com wrote:
 No, visible handling should be the same as before, but I didn't test the 
 b1900d - will take a look and ensure I haven't done anything silly.

 The change I have made (which did need some re-work, and may have caused the 
 bug you're seeing) is *visible* pick animations can have invisible 
 'pick-proxy' elements, specified by 'proxy-name' in the XML. The C172P uses 
 these so tiny switches (on the KMA-20 audio-panel) are easier to hit. (The 
 C172p 3D model already had such polygons, the actual switches were not 
 pickable - this didn't work so well in my new scheme, hence the support for 
 pick-proxies to make things as usable as possible).

 Again, this is likely 'just a bug', I'll test / fix over the weekend.

 Based on a *very* quick look, the B1900d seems fine here - can you send me a 
 screenshot of what is 'missing'? I also don't see any errors about bad object 
 names either.

I'm seeing a number of missing controls on the a4f as well with
current git binaries.  They are present with a binary from about a
month ago, so I'm fairly sure it's related to the recent changes.

I get a bunch of console errors matching the missing instruments:

Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'UHFFreqSelectManual'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'UHFFreqSelectGoXMIT'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation: 'UHFOff'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation: 'UHFTR'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation: 'UHFADF'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'TACANModeOFF'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'TACANModeREC'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'TACANModeAA'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'RadarModeOFF'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'RadarModeSTBY'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'RadarModeSRCH'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'RadarModeAG'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation: 'GunSwitch'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'RadarRangeSwitchLong'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'BHDIModeSwitchNAVCMPTR'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'BHDIModeSwitchNAVPAC'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'SpoilerSwitchArm'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'SteeringSwitchOff'
Could not find at least one of the following objects for animation:
'APCSwitchOff'

Most of these objects are animated in
AIrcraft/a4/Models/Instruments/a4f-panel-xh.xml

Screenshot highlighting the missing knobs:
http://www.nanjika.co.uk/flightgear/missing.jpg

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Joystick dialog configuration fix

2013-04-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Clément,

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Clement de l'Hamaide wrote:
 I'm using a Thrustmaster Hotas-x and I noticed that nasal section on top
 of the original file (
 $FG_DATA/Input/Joysticks/Thrustmaster/T-Flight-Hotas-X.xml ) is not copied
 to the custom file written in $FG_HOME after modification from the Joystick
 Configuration dialog.
 This missing nasal section break the behaviour because 2 variables are not
 declared (in my case, I don't know for other .xml files).

 Looking at joystick.nas this is expected since nasal is not handled so
 I've fixed it.
 Here is the git diff who fix the issue : http://pastebin.com/XaanECUs

This has now been committed.

Thanks!

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Air-to-air refuelling enhancement

2013-04-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:24 PM, jean wrote:
 one more bug  (was my mistake ):

   in tanker .nas, we need to normalise the degre in line 26O-261 to have:

   me.hOffsetN.setDoubleValue(view.normdeg(me.bearing -
 ac_hdg));
   me.vOffsetN.setDoubleValue(view.normdeg(elev - ac_pitch));

 this was done in the 2.10.1, but not in next ( i sent you a mail
 probably lost in the numerical world).

Yes - I lost that email.

Now committed.

Thanks,

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Reloading checklist

2013-04-11 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 8:35 PM, Jean-Yves LEBLEU wrote:
 This is what I did :
 var checklist=777-200-checklists.xml;
  var checklist_path=sprintf(%s/%s,getprop(/sim/aircraft-dir),checklist);
  print(checklist_path);
  var data = io.read_properties(checklist_path,/sim/checklists);

 It does reload the checklists but conditions are not evaludated 

Hi Jean-Yves,

It is strange that the conditions are not evaluated.  Have you had a look
using the property browser to see if the property structure is as you would
expect?

It might be worth trying deleting the /sim/checklists node first,
something like:

props.globals.getNode(/sim).removeChild(checklists);

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Improved usability

2013-04-11 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi James,

This is superb work.  I've just taken a flight in the c172p to try out
the new features, and I'm very impressed.

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, James Turner wrote:
 - made a 'right-drag to look' mouse mode, which I think should be on 
 by default (with the current behaviour available for people who prefer it). 
 Also there is now visual feedback when changing the mouse mode 'statefully', 
 which is still available via the TAB key in addition to right-clicking.

Though I'm a dyed-in-the-wool mouse-looker who continually switched
between cursor and mouse-look, I'm completely converted to this way of
looking - way more intuitive IMO and really easy for users to learn.

One minor suggestion - I used the mouse wheel field-of-view control a
lot when in look mode.  Having it change the field of view while the
right mouse button is pressed would be good.

 - made dedicated animation components for knobs / sliders, with 
 unified handling of buttons / mouse wheel / dragging.

I particularly like how this reduces XML file complexity.

 - added tooltips, and hover-feedback for pickable areas in cockpits

I'm seeing some bugs in this, in particular after hovering over some
control in the c172p (possibly the alitmeter?) I got Aircraft Help
displayed as all tooltips, and the following errors in the console:

Nasal runtime error: nil used in numeric context
  at /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/geo.nas, line 241
  called from: /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/canvas/tooltip.nas, line 167
  called from: /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/canvas/tooltip.nas, line 119
  called from: /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/canvas/tooltip.nas, line 91
  called from: /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/canvas/tooltip.nas, line 270
  called from: /home/stuart/FlightGear/data/Nasal/canvas/tooltip.nas, line 313

geo.normgeg should probably be more robust

As a bonus function, for multi-mode toggle switches, it would be
great to be able to define labels for different values (e.g. 0=OFF,
1=ON)


 For more complex aircraft such as the Constellation, Concorde or 747, adding 
 tooltips will be a lot of work, but greatly assist in figuring out what 
 everything does.

Well, such is the price of progress.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Air-to-air refuelling enhancement

2013-04-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
I've (finally) managed to add the code to allow offsets for the tanker
fuelling positions
and the receivers probe position.  See the A-4F for an example of how
to set this.

One can now use small envelope sizes and use the relative drogue and
probe position
to refuel.

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 1:03 PM, jean pellotier  wrote:
 after a few runs behind ai tankers, and some crashs in the sky, i think
 the a4f need to have at least the drogue and hose not hot.

Thanks. This is now done.  I've also made a similar fix to the A330-MRTT which
I crashed into myself :)

 the radius definitely need the offsets , i was unable to make contact in
 the usual position with a short radius :)

This is now done.

 when you're in tanker.nas , I think that in turns, the tanker don't have
 a rotation correct respect to the bank angle, when you follow you don't
 have the same bank angle and it's a bit strange.  here i got a much
 better behaviour with this patch:

I've committed this as well.  Thanks.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Reloading checklist

2013-04-10 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Jean-Yves,

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 8:27 PM, Jean-Yves LEBLEU wrote:
 Hello,

 I have started to write checklists for 777, is there any way to reload the
 checklist without restarting flightgear, I tried with shift-esc with no
 success.
 Or maybe there is a little nas script to do the trick ?

Yes, this should be possible, provided your checklists are in a separate file.

See Nasal/io.nas and the read_properties() function.  There are some examples
in the comments around line 67.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Cloud detail range and faint clouds

2013-04-09 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 The problem are faint Cirrus-type clouds which use 2-3 sprites, or in extreme 
 cases just a single one (they have a transparency of more than 90% and are 
 really just a faint haze modulation). Here, dropping half of the sprites 
 essentially mutilates the appearance of the cloud. I have just comitted some 
 very nice undulatus pattern distributions, and dropping half (actually in 
 practice about 2/3 of the sprites seem to go...) just changes the appearance 
 of the sky drastically.

IIRC the sprites are distributed on the surface of a squashed sphere,
which might explain why with small numbers of sprites more than 50%
might disappear.  Or it might be a bug.


 I think ideally a way to drop sprites only for certain types of clouds and 
 protect the faint ones would be desirable. Do we for instance  have an unused 
 attribute slot where the number of sprites used to generate the cloud can be 
 passed?

I'll add it to my TODO list :)

Presumably making cirrus clouds after more sprites doesn't make for
very realistic clouds because of the size of the cloud structures?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] A collection of questions

2013-04-08 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 8:04 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 If I may bother everyone again - here's my current list of open questions. 
 Any help or pointers would be appreciated:

Things have been remarkably quiet the last couple of weeks - good to
have something to discuss :)

 * Where do the runway and taxiway lights enter the rendering scheme? They 
 need to be fogged consistently with the rest of the scene, but I do not know 
 where to set this - which effect are they using?

I suspect they are just using the default terrain effect, if anything.
 They are generated from the C-code when the tile it loaded  (IIRC
simgear/scene/tgdb/obj.cxx though I'm not at my FG computer to check)

If you want any changes I'd be happy to make them, though I'd expect
it's the sort of change that you could make yourself with a little
digging :).

FYI, I've got a list as long as my arm of FG things to do, and have
struggled to find any time to spend on FG for the last month.

Off the top of my head I've got the following things on my plate right now:
- Improve Basic Weather integration with Atmospheric shaders.
Thorsten's provided soem documentation of the properties to be set,
and I need to either write some property rules for Basic Weather or
modify the C-code.
- Review Vivian's changes to the Weather dialog  (this is not to mean
I don't think Vivian's work is a step forward, I just need to think
about it a bit)
- Modify trees so that there's no need to change the texture set under
atmospheric light shading.  This is almost complete and means that
trees above the snow-line are snow-covered, and deciduous trees in
autumn/winter lose their leaves
- Further improvements to AA refueling - support drogue/probe positions
- Move the loading of trees/buildings from the tile loading into a
deferred LoD node so that they only get generated when the user gets
closer to them.  This should improve tile loading times and memory
occupancy.

Of course, it's nice to have so many interesting tasks to work on, but
if anyone is looking for some work to do and would like to take one
one of the tasks, they'd be very welcome :)

 * Where does precipitation enter the rendering scheme?

It'll be somewhere in the C code.  I'll have a root around for it and
let you know.

 * Why are the runway and taxiway designation signs using the terrain shader? 
 Can (should) this be changed?

Yup, I'm sure this can be changed :)  I'll take a look if no-one beats
me too it.

 See http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47t=18999

 * Can we generate more vertex attributes than tangents, normals and 
 binormals? For instance, can we do components of the curvature?

I would think it would be straightforward to do this, but I don't know
the perf/capacity impact of doing so.

 * How difficult would it be to expand the tree generating system to a 
 multi-tier system in which we can in addition generate a circle of vegetation 
 in the range of ~50-100 m for high resolution scenes landing off airfields? 
 Do we generate the memory load from trees at tile loading time, or at tree 
 loading time?

Currently we generate all the trees at tile loading time, and then use
LoD to control how many are displayed.  So the memory cost of incurred
at tile load time.

As mentioned above, I'd like to change this so that tree generation is
deferred into the LoD node.  Mathias has shown how this can be done,
and I need to extend his work.

I don't think there's a sensible way to generate additional trees at
50-100m.  With the changes described above, the overall memory
occupancy of trees should go down, so perhaps it won't matter as much?

 * Just how are the LOD ranges defined in the view menu used? I am genuinely 
 confused, I understand that LOD bare sets the terrain, but that's the limit. 
 Does anyone know?

To my embarrassment, I don't know how they are used, except to say
that they aren't used for tree, random buildings, and (probably)
random objects.
That's probably a bug.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Compasses, magnetic variation, and stuff

2013-03-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Alasdair Campbell wrote:
 Now the comments at the beginning of coremag.cxx imply that the module
 originally implemented
 wmm2000 and was updated by Wim Van Hoydonck
 (wim.van.hoydo...@gmail.com) to wmm2005.
 The current version is now wmm2010, and I wonder if simgear has been
 updated to reflect this?
 Could this account for my heading discrepancy at EGPF?

Probably not.  It's more likely that the magnetic variation has simply changed
since the runway number was set, as it varies over time.

IIRC Edinburgh airport (EGPH) had to re-number it's runways a while
back for exactly this
reason.  Indeed, I think we may have had to re-number our own runways
at East Fortune
last time they got repainted.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Compasses, magnetic variation, and stuff

2013-03-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On 12 Mar 2013, at 20:18, Alasdair Campbell wrote:

 Thank you Stuart  James for your responses,
 Stuart, I was not so much interested in what is painted on the ground, but 
 what is indicated on the slaved
 gyro. Your comments have made me reconsider my maths.
 
 apt.dat shows a true heading for EGPF R05 of 46.34 (where does one find true 
 runway headings?)
 Magvar on 2011 was 4.0W 
 (http://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com/public/index.php%3Foption=com_contenttask=blogcategoryid=72Itemid=121.html)
 Annual Rate of Change 0.17°E (source as above)
 So current Magvar =3.66W
 Now I suppose I must  ADD?  this figure to the true heading? giving 50.00 as 
 the magnetic heading for EGPF R05.
 The slaved compass reports 50.03, which is good enough for me, But I wonder 
 if, as James suggested, upgrading to
 ww2010 might lose the tiny difference. I may try this on a local repo and see 
 what happens.

Yes, you add the variation in the uk at present (I have a mnemonic of small 
map, big world, so add the variation. :] )

I think one your talking about small fractions of a degree you are well into 
noise territory and I'd be surprised of updating the magnetic model would make 
much difference. Your base data of 4.0W mag variation at EGPF is probably only 
accurate +/- 0.25. I had a quick look at my chart and the +4.5W variation line 
is not too far to the west. 

 Sorry for thinking aloud, but I find this wmm  stuff fascinating, though 
 complicated.

Yes, it's very interesting. My chart for Ireland specifically warns about the 
large variation (+5W) which I'm sure catches people out. And that's before you 
have to add variation due to the airframe !

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Crazy usability suggestion of the day

2013-03-05 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:10 AM, James Turner wrote:
 Can anyone tell me a problem, with forcing startup location to 'not a runway' 
 *when MP is enabled* ?

 I'd pick an available parking at semi-random, if the airport has parking 
 locations. Another option, if the airport has a ground-network, would be to 
 try to guess a hold-short location for the runway, but that rapidly becomes 
 tricky with parallel runways, different aircraft radii, and so on. Parking 
 locations seem safer, but people will have to taxi in MP mode. I'm sure the 
 ATCs would prefer than anyway.

 This *could* disregard the --runway option, but then we're actively 
 over-riding the user's wishes, rather than just avoiding a default behaviour 
 which is bad with MP on. In the GUI (airport selector dialog ) we could 
 disable the 'best runway' option, or even the runway selector combo entirely, 
 if we wished to be strict about it. ('this feature is disabled in multiplayer 
 mode' prompt text, of course)

 Comments?

I think this is a fine idea.  At present working out the available
parking positions for and airport from outside the sim is a bit of a
pain.  (In fact I usually start with MP off, then use the Select
Airport dialog to position at a parking position, and then turn MP on)

I assume by semi-random you mean to choose parking positions fairly
close to the approach end of the active runway?

Making a similar change to the airport selector would be a good idea
as well, though obviously we'd only disable the option if parking
positions exist for the airport.

On a related note, I've been wondering whether we should start the sim
with the engines running when starting from a runway.  Being on the
runway with the engine off isn't particularly realistic.  If we were
feeling particularly keen also having the altimeter set and the radios
tuned to the tower frequency might be nice.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] FG vs. FSX demo

2013-02-28 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Thorsten, :)

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 7:57 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 My problem is that I often know very well how X is implemented in FG, I may 
 suspect that it's not in FSX or X-Plane, but since I'm not running X-Plane or 
 FSX with all addons I don't really know for a fact if it is a genuinely 
 unique feature or if there is a 3rd party addon to FSX/X-Plane which provides 
 the same thing. And we would want to be factually correct here.

The 2.10 release has sparked some interest over at avsim.com
(http://forum.avsim.net/forum/198-the-flightgear-forum/) where various
FS-X and X-Plane users have been giving it a try and comparing it with
other sims.  It makes for interesting reading - I hadn't appreciated
what a big deal not being able to configure a joystick from a GUI was
until I read a couple of comments highlighting it as a big V2.10
feature.  There's also positive comments about atmospheric rendering,
smoothness and FDM quality.

I agree that working out what's unique is difficult, and it's a moving
target given the add-ons.  Just last week I read a thread from someone
asking about failure mode (MTBF/MCBF), something we've had in FG for
years.  Further down the thread someone responded saying they'd just
written an iPhone/iPad app to do just that.  Ah well, it was unique
for a couple of years at least :).

-Stuart

PS:  Further up the thread Thorsten mentioned that FS-X instruments
seemed jerky.  IIRC the instrumentation in MSFS has a fixed refresh
rate (30fps?).

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft Checklists

2013-02-27 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Alan Teeder wrote:
 The reason for my query was that I have found making a representative set of
 checklists is becoming  very unwieldy.

 With just my entering the cockpit checks, I have already made 9 separate
 checklist.  Each one has about 10 checks. I have made one checklist per
 check list card on the real aircraft. These  checklist items disappear off
 the top of the menu list screen, and there is no indications as to which
 checklists/cards have been completed, or which is the next to do.

 Having got this far it is obvious that the current system will not cope for
 the rest of the aircraft checklists that I intend to replicate.

 OK,  sounds like you've got much longer checklists than I have encountered
 myself.

 I'll see what I can do to support multi-page checklists.  I can probably add
 Next and Previous buttons to page through the checklist.

This is now available.

item nodes can now be grouped under a page, which the checklist display
handles as you would expect.

I've also added support for marker tags which leverage the existing tutorial
markers.

I've updated Docs/README.checklist and the wiki to reflect both these changes.

As always, the c172p has an example (Aircraft/c172p/c172-checklists.xml).

I've still to update the checklist-tutorial converter to support the
tags - that's
next on my TODO list.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Air-to-air refuelling enhancement

2013-02-24 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

I've just committed some small changes to the AI air-to-air refueling function:

1) Added support for multiple tankers of each type, selectable through
the AI-Tankers GUI.  Tankers are now defined in AI/tankers.xml.
2) Added an A-4F buddy tanker.
3) Enhanced the UI to allow the user to set the speed of the tanker,
and the radius at which contact is made.  Note that this is based on
the origin of tanker and user.  As a future enhancement I want to add
offsets to indicate the position of the refuelling probe/receiver
on the user aircraft, and the location of the boom/drogue on the tanker.
4) Added a user-toggled function to display messages when contact i
made or lost.  Some aircraft
don't seem to have any obvious cockpit indicator that refuelling is in
progress, and we don't currently animate the probe being in the drogue
:)
5) Added maximum fuel flow definitions to both the tanker and
receiver.  While the KC-135 supports
flow of 6000 lbs/min, smaller tankers (such as the A4-F buddy tanker)
only provided ~1300 lbs/min.  the actual fuel flow is taken as the
minimum of the two.

Note that the maximum fuel flow affects both AI and MP tankers.  I've
been unable to test with the latter, but have set a default to ensure
backwards compatibility.

Feedback welcome as always.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Low visibility issues

2013-02-21 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:59 PM, James Turner wrote:
 Suggestion - if z/Z are pressed with advanced weather enabled, make the 
 popup-message say 'disabled since visibility is being controlled by advanced 
 weather'.

 Another option would be to move the visibility control to a dialog, with a 
 slider / spin box, and explicitly disable it when advanced weather is 
 selection. Then we could lose the keybinding completely, which is something I 
 want to move towards for options that are infrequently used, but taking up 
 'keyboard space'.

I agree that it shouldn't be a keyboard assignment, and we should remove it.

I'd need to check, but I thought this was already part of the weather
configuration dialog.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft Checklists

2013-02-18 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Alan Teeder wrote:
 The reason for my query was that I have found making a representative set of
 checklists is becoming  very unwieldy.

 With just my entering the cockpit checks, I have already made 9 separate
 checklist.  Each one has about 10 checks. I have made one checklist per
 check list card on the real aircraft. These  checklist items disappear off
 the top of the menu list screen, and there is no indications as to which
 checklists/cards have been completed, or which is the next to do.

 Having got this far it is obvious that the current system will not cope for
 the rest of the aircraft checklists that I intend to replicate.

OK,  sounds like you've got much longer checklists than I have encountered
myself.

I'll see what I can do to support multi-page checklists.  I can probably add
Next and Previous buttons to page through the checklist.

One question:  Would you prefer that the UI itself split the checklist up,
or for the checklist author to do it themselves?  The former would be
automatic, but wouldn't allow the author to place the page-break where
they wished.

 Yes, my level of simulation will include such detail as the fail to relight
 in 20 seconds scenario.

Very good :)

 For background info my suggestions were based upon an interactive checklist
 system that I was involved with in the 1980´s as part of a joint BAC/Hawker
 Siddeley  glass cockpit simulation. This was before the two companies merged
 to form BAe.  AFAIK this was the first glass cockpit project to have an in
 depth simulator evaluation. Our two target aircraft were the VC10 (
 completely eliminating the flight engineer station) and the A300 which was
 state of the art at that time.

 This electronic checklist also bought up the relevant systems displays on
 one or more other front panel CRT´s . In normal use (e.g. start-up) the
 electronic checklist was selected by the crew, but the relevant set of
 checks were automatically initiated when aircraft failures were detected.
 The system was intelligent enough to follow the sequence of events following
 an emergency (e.g. my relight scenario) , and also had a priority system to
 deal with the major faults (engine failure, fire, etc)  before lesser ones.

 At the moment my TSR2 is not a glass cockpit, but having a usable checklist
 system would save a lot of paper.

 AS an old fogey I am not up to speed with current developments in this
 field, but am sure that some of our work has a modern counterpart.

Yup, and I think that would be the glass cockpit of the aircraft itself rather
than the simulator UI.

 Anyway - you asked for comments on your checklist system ;)

Yup, and very good feedback it is as well.  Thanks.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft Checklists

2013-02-17 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 9:23 PM, Alan Teeder wrote:
 Is there any way to chain checklists automatically so that they follow one
 another in a pre-defined order?

They should appear in the checklists dialog in the order in which they are
defined in the XML file, so simply define them in the order you wish.

 An alternative, which may have further advantages, would be to have a tree
 structure of checklists, where one branch has to be completed before going
 back to the trunk and then on to the next branch.

Note that the checklist function doesn't enforce any action on the part of the
pilot.  It simply provides a convenient representation of a textual checklist
plus some highlighting to indicate completed steps and (once I get around to
it) the ability to highlight the relevant controls.

 e.g. on cockpit entry I want to do a right to left sequence of checks,
 starting with the port  side panel, going on to the port coaming, then the
 port instrument panel etc, covering the whole cockpit methodically. Each of
 these panels has up to a dozen checks. This is how the checks were actually
 organised  (with a book of cards) on this particular aircraft. The cockpit
 entry  checks were then followed by the start sequence, the after starting,
 the take off, after take-off,  circuit ad approach /landing checks.

I don't think that's a tree structure, just an ordered list, which is
already provided.

 The emergency checks also follow a tree structure, but in this case the next
 branch depends upon the result of a particular check. (e.g. did the engine
 relight within 20 seconds?)

I think that's getting a bit specialized, and overly complicated.  I'd
also point out
that we're just supporting the pilot's use of checklists, not
attempting to automate
them.  I don't think it's unreasonable to have a checklist items that says

if the engine does not relight within 20 seconds, run the Engine Dead
Checklist

(Additionally I'd be pleasantly surprised if our systems/failure
modelling is good
enough that such a decision tree wouldn't always go down the same path.)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Autumn colors

2013-02-15 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 9:33 AM, Erik Hofman wrote:
 On 02/15/2013 10:00 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
 So I will remove the option from GIT again and clear out  the *-autumn.png 
 textures in the next days and develop this further for my own private 
 enjoyment (with the understanding that I'll make it available on request to 
 anyone interested), which should give anyone else the chance to implement a 
 drop-down seasons model for 3.0 without generating confusing clashes. No 
 hard feelings from my side, I don't come with the expectation that everyone 
 shares my enthusiasm for painting the terrain. Admittedly it's not at the 
 core of what makes a Flightsim.

 I'm not sure this is necessary. I think an opt-in checkbox would
 suffice. After all FlightGear has been around for personal experiments
 for a very long time. So why not this option.

+1.  I think removing it is going a bit far.  It's early in the
release cycle as well, so there's plenty of time to iron out issues
and work out a suitable scheme that satisfies those who just want a
quick'n'dirty way to get a roughly autumnal palette, and those willing
to take the time to tune the environment to exactly match what they
see outside.

I've still to look into this in detail (too many other things on my
plate right now), but I'm confident I can some up with a sensible user
interface.

Finally, it's worth remembering the -devel list only represents a
small part of the FG userbase, and those not using git have not even
had the chance to try this yet.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Autumn colors

2013-02-14 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM, James Turner wrote:
 In this specific case, that means there shouldn't be a slider, there should
 be some additional values in a place that can be customised per-region.
 Since what the *user* wants is that in the region they are in, the colours /
 effect look plausible - that's all. Messing around with sliders they don't
 really understand, is not a good thing for them to be doing.

We could provide some per-region customization within materials.xml,
for example.
Unfortunately the current materials.xml format is getting quite
unwieldy, particularly
with all the regionalized settings.  I have a long-term plan to
structure the information
better.

A shorter term solution might be to offer a default Autumn drop-down
with generic
plausible values, and an Advanced dialog with sliders.  I need to
integrate support
for autumnal trees anyway, so this fits in with that.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] FG 2.10 Change Log and Release Announcement

2013-02-13 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

The complete 2.10 changelog is available here:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Changelog_2.10

I've now made it read-only.  If anyone has any final comments/edits
they want to make, please let me know.

I anticipate using a slightly modified version of the first couple of
paragraphs for the release announcement.  i.e.:


The FlightGear development team is happy to announce the v2.10 release
of FlightGear, the free, open-source flight simulator. This new
version contains many exciting new features, enhancements and
bugfixes. Highlights in this release include improved usability,
better terrain rendering and a fully scriptable 2D rendering system.
A list of major changes can be found at
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Changelog_2.10.

Founded in 1997, FlightGear is developed by a worldwide group of
volunteers, brought together by a shared ambition to create the most
realistic flight simulator possible that is free to use, modify and
distribute. FlightGear is used all over the world by desktop flight
simulator enthusiasts, for research in universities and for
interactive exhibits in museums.

FlightGear features more than 400 aircraft, a worldwide scenery
database, a multi-player environment, detailed sky modelling, a
flexible and open aircraft modelling system, varied networking
options, multiple display support, a powerful scripting language and
an open architecture. Best of all, being open-source, the simulator is
owned by the community and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

Download FlightGear v2.10 for free from FlightGear.org.

FlightGear - Fly Free!


Comments welcome as always.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Final release checklist

2013-02-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 Do we have the latest getstart.pdf compiled and picked into the release
 branch?

Yes, this is already done.

Toshi recently sent some updates that I'll try to get in before the weekend,
but they aren't shipstopper issues.

 Anything else to think about?

I committed a change about a week ago to display a warning in the
Rendering dialog for those using Intel integrated GPUs.  I don't
know whether it was pulled into the release branch or not, but it's
a safe change that might reduce some support questions on the forum.

(Sorry - can't give the commit hash right now as I'm away on business)

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Manual update request (Was: Updated Short Reference for 2.10.0)

2013-02-12 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Thanks Toshi.  I'll try to get these changes incorporated before the
weekend release.

-Stuart

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:56 PM, YOSHIMATSU Toshihide
qzt04...@nifty.ne.jp wrote:
 Hi Martin and Stuart,

 I checked incorrect or dead links in the current version of Manual
 (except Appendix).

 Following are the results and my suggestions.

 * 3.3 Installing documentation

 http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/
   -- Alive, but incorrect. Please change to http://get.adobe.com/reader/
   Also it would be better to correct the description:
   Adobe's Acrobat Reader, available from
   -- Adobe Reader, available from

 * 8.10 The autopilot

 https://www3.bendixking.com/servlet/com.honeywell.aes.utility.PDFDownLoadServlet?FileName=/TechPubs/repository/006-18034-_2.pdf
   -- Connection has timed out. Please delete this link.

 * 8.13.1 How to land the Cherokee Warrior II

 http://www.alioth.net/flying/pa28-161/index.html
 -- Connection has timed out. Please delete this link.

 * 10.5 Epilogue

 http://worldaerodata.com
 -- Very unfortunately, server not found. Please delete this link.
  cf. http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=27t=19067

 http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/aviation/instrument_flying_handbook
 -- http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/aviation/media/FAA-H-8083-15B.pdf
  or
  http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/aviation/
   Also it would be better to correct the description:
   It can be downloaded as multiple PDF files.
   -- It can be downloaded as a PDF file.


 Moreover, I noticed that Part IV Appendices includes no sections, and
 Part V Annexes includes Appendix A (Missed approach) and B (Landing).

 In the commit log of getstart.tex:
 http://mapserver.flightgear.org/git/gitweb.pl?p=getstart;a=commitdiff;h=799005980b3825dfc731e1528473630b9cd906d5

   iflanguage{english}{
   part{Annexes}
   {}

 might should be

   iflanguage{french}{
   part{Annexes}
   {}

 but I'm not sure if Annexes is French word...

 Cheers,
 Toshi

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Checklists enhancement

2013-02-09 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:11 PM, Alan Teederwrote:
 Is the intention to make tutorials easier to compose, or is it to replace
 them?

Easier to compose.  The tutorial system is much richer than the checklists,
for example it supports specific error conditions, audio, and multiple messages.

 At the moment, checklist.nas fails at line 6 – presumably because my
 aircraft doe not yet have a checklist.

Now fixed.  Thanks for the report.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Checklists enhancement

2013-02-09 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
 one request I would like to place is to automatically spread the checklist
 over multiple pages if it gets longer than, say 20 lines. Especially the
 complex birds tend to have long checklists ;-)

That's a bit tricky to do within the GUI, and the split would be quite
arbitrary.

I would think it better for aircraft maintainers to split the checklists
themselves.  That way they can split them at a suitable point.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Checklists enhancement

2013-02-07 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 2:41 PM, James Turner wrote:
 I'm thinking of combining this with the tutorial system so you can
 have a virtual co-pilot go through the checklist, calling out the
 items for you to complete.

 I'd be interested to hear if those who like flying heavy iron think
 this would be a useful function.

 Categorically yes - the checklists are already nice for the 737NG, and
 the big iron has far greater need for the tutorials - starting the Connie or
 similar is quite some work :)

This is now added.

Tutorials are now generated for all checklists at runtime.  They are pretty
basic, but it's a nice freebie.

One future enhancement i've just thought off might be to enhance the checklist
so that an item can have a marker associated with it as we have with tutorials.
A user could then click on a checklist item to have the appropriate
cockpit control
highlighted.

This further blurs the line between the checklist and tutorial functions,
but users might find the self-pacing aspect of checklists easier to use than the
forced pace of the tutorial.

Useful?  Taking things a bit too far?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] [Flightgear-commitlogs] SimGear branch, next, updated. fd8369142a291a473e8d1587ad0d7fcc252b6ad5

2013-02-06 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:05 PM, James Turner wrote:
 Is this a significant enough / safe enough change to push to the release 
 branch?

It should be safe enough, as it's just applying some techniques
already used for the
trees.

I'm ambivalent about whether it's a release branch candidate though,
as building perf
isn't a major issue in most circumstances.

It does gives me a significant frame-rate boost in very large urban
areas (KLAX) from
~6fps to ~15fps with building density = 2.5.

Definite candidate for a 2.10 maintenance branch and 2.10.1 release.

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Winter Textures ( was Re: Release candidates)

2013-01-31 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Vivian Meazza wrote:

 I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here: we now have so many
 different options, but getting snow by method 2 or 3 results in deciduous
 trees in full leaf with snow coverage on the ground. Not an impossible
 scenario, but bare trees are more likely. Is this a bug?

I'll claim it's a limitation of the current scheme rather than a bug :).

As it happens I've got a fix/enhancements for this sitting on my
computer right now that's just about ready to push, but which I need
to discuss.

Basically, at present the trees are represented by a 512x128 texture
containing 8 trees in row.  My enhancement is to change this to a
512x512 texture containing 4 rows or tree, representing summer,
summer+snow, winter and winter+snow.

I then have a small change to the shader (that doesn't use an if
test :)   ) to shift the texture to the correct row depending on the
snow level and whether we think it's winter or not.

We need both snow and winter as separate states as with snow alone
you'd end up with deciduous trees with leaves below the snowline and
bare branches above - acid snow ?

There are a couple of problems I'd like advice on:

1) (pre-existing)  Under rembrandt, the winter deciduous tree texture
suffers as it has significant alpha but isn't registered as a
transparent object.

2) It's not clear to me that we want to display trees with snow on
them above the snowline.  In my experience, trees very quickly lose
their snow cover after snow-fall if there's any wind.  So perhaps the
snow-covered trees should only be used if snow is actually falling,
and what we really need is a simple way to change from summer to
winter tree textures?

3) We use /sim/startup/season to indicate whether it is summer or
winter.  That's a string (summer, winter) that I need to map into
an integer to pass down the stack to a uniform in the shader.  There's
no obvious way to do this mapping, so I'm thinking of changing the
property we currently use (/sim/startup/season) globally to
/environment/winter or somesuch, with type integer.

And, to go back to the original point about winter textures I agree
that we need to keep them.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Random building bugfix for Atmospheric Light Scattering

2013-01-30 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 9:16 AM, James Turner wrote:
 Okay, I'll wait for some feedback from Stuart and then merge, if no one beats 
 me to it.

I've had a look, and it all looks fine.  Please merge back to 2.10.0.

Thanks,

-Stuart

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[Flightgear-devel] Checklists enhancement

2013-01-30 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Guys,

Just a quick note to mention that I pushed a change to the checklists
function last night that allows you to add condition blocks to
checklist items to indicate when the checklist item is complete.

If a condition block exists for an item, it's displayed in green
when evaluated to true, and yellow otherwise.

This provides the user with some feedback that they've completed the
checklist item successfully.

Documentation is available under Docs/README.checklists, the wiki
(http://wiki.flightgear.org/Aircraft_Checklists).  The c172p contains
a number of examples.

I'm thinking of combining this with the tutorial system so you can
have a virtual co-pilot go through the checklist, calling out the
items for you to complete.

I'd be interested to hear if those who like flying heavy iron think
this would be a useful function.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Updated Short Reference for 2.10.0

2013-01-30 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi James,

Both HTML and PDF versions of the short reference were checked in
(Docs/FGShortRef.pdf).

-Stuart

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:01 PM, James Turner zakal...@mac.com wrote:

 On 29 Jan 2013, at 21:55, Stuart Buchanan stuar...@gmail.com wrote:

 I've just pushed a small commit checking in new versions of the FG
 Short Reference, something I should have done with the updated Manual
 a while back.


 How do I generate a nice PDF / similar from this to include in the Mac DMG?
 (Or can you generate it and email it to me?)

 James

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[Flightgear-devel] Aircraft download page for 2.10.0

2013-01-30 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Guys,

Would it be possible to have auto-filtering of the aircraft download
page based on rating for the upcoming release?

I know that Gijs did some work in this area prior to the last release,
and I think it would really help new users in identifying the really
high quality aircraft.

-Stuart

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