Christian asks: > "Curtis L. Olson" wrote: > > Landing lights: I saw a very convincing implimentation of this in a > > sim where the ground was a 100% flat plane in all directions and they > > did their own ground lighting calcs. They used a texture to simulate > > the imperfections of the lens in the beam and it looked really cool. > > I can't think of a really good strategy for doing this in the context > > of arbitrary and complex terrain (and opengl lighting.) Maybe someone > > else with a bit of opengl experience might have some ideas. > Well, can't we *assume* that the rumway is perfactly flat?
No, for two reasons: (1) little runways, 4000ft / 1km length or so, were built cheaply and tend to follow topographic features since the aircraft have no trouble with this. (2) big runways, 10000ft / 2km length or more, have trouble with the max transitional slope between the surroundings and the runway surface, so tend to try to follow the general ground tendency slightly. Changes in surface angle below 0.1% are trivially visible and contribute to the visual challenge of flying at realistic airports. > IMHO it's save so assume that the landinglights are only used on the > runway. All other cases sould be too rare to really care about them. Yes, we could make many lighting methods work; unfortunately as soon as we do that, people will complain that it doesn't look right when they crash into a mountain, or do an off-field landing on grass, or similar. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
