I do not own Fly!, so I can not comment on it. >It also appears that the >perspective is not consistant with the exterior view angle. In some cases it >makes sense to do this so that you can see the panel pretty much straight on >(necessary to read the gauges) and be able to see the runway well.
Maybe I am missunderstanding you completely. There are two basic ways that I know you can do a cockpit. 1. Do a 2D bitmap and display it 1:1 on the screen. This was a good way when for example EAW came out years ago and all people had 640 x 480 resolution. Since you display the pixels 1:1, without stretching, (bilinear) filtering etc you can have them very nice looking and legible. You can do anti aliasing and optimize it pixel-by-pixel. There is still a very active EAW community and one of the things they hate most is the fixed 640 x 480 size cockpits. 2. You can do a real 3D cockpit with the gauge faces textured. If you have this, then I see no reason why looking at it in one direction should be better than others. Say a face is 256 x 256. Lets say you have 1280x1024 and the face is 1/7 of the width, so it is 183 pixels on the screen. So, it would not be "optimal", even if you look at it from straight ahead. I do not really see a middle way between these, apart from doing both. You can with much work optimize a 3D panel for exactly one resolution and view direction and switch off filtering for this part of the scene graph and maybe prefilter it offline, for exactly that resolution and viewing angle. The effect is that of a 2D cockpit, only that you have invested more time to reach it. The bad thing is that you would need to do this for every supported resolution. Off course you can do a 2D cockpit besides your 3D one and just map the 3D textures on, but if you do not optimize it for the resolution, I do not really see why it should look much more legible than a true 3D panel. I just looked at a true 3D cockpit and it is legible in 800 x 600, you can easily read the needles and the larger numbers of larger gauges. From 1024 x 768 upwards, it is very nice and only limited by the textures (some unimportant gauges have very low res textures since this sim was done for slow computers). Looking slightly angled at the panel it looks just as good as straight. It is a medium sparsely populated cockpit, so a 747 cockpit needs more resolution. Off course one question you always have to ask yourself is what computer to optimize for. I do not expect that if someone does a nicely working implementation now, someone else will completely reimplement it with another algorithm in say a year just to optimize it for better computers. So, we should IMHO optimize for a computer that is standard in say a year or even two. So, IMHO we can optimize for a resolution of 1280 x 1024. That does not mean you can not read the values of the gauges at smaller res, but maybe not all the smaller numbers etc. BTW, the GeForce 4 that just came out doubled the framerate of one flightsim in high resolutions with AA, so I go on thinking resolution and use of AA will increase in future. >These are in Fly!. And I have to say that the Fly! panels are the ones I like >the best. Compared to which? It is well known the ones in MSFS are badly implemented. >Best, > >Jim Bye bye, Wolfram _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
