Hi, Let me introduce myself, before I start with what I'm interested at.
I had a first look at flightgear about 1.5 years ago, but decided to go with FS2K and got deeply involved in scenery creation (also done some panel work). The last year I spent mostly trying to crack FS2K2 bgls, and I probably know them better than anyone else who is not part of the M$ FS team. I have to say that I've had it know with the obvious complete stubbornness on Microsofts part to not provide any form of help to customize their simulator. All the time I have spent trying to do my own things, probably would have been spent better spent helping out here, and trying to incorporate the FS2K2 features into FG. I decided that I'd from now on rather help here, then continue to hit my head against the brick wall in Redmond. My main goal is to convert the commercial 1:25000 topographical data for New Zealand, I'm sitting on into a flight simulator and to get some decent scenery + good framerates. I actually haven't downloaded the latest FG yet, but I will do so as soon as I have time (I'll be away for a week now), and then try to set everything up. I'll be probably working in both Linux and Windows as I only have Windows at home (I didn't use Linux at home anymore so got rid of it, not enough diskspace :) ). I'm a postdoc at Melbourne University working in the field of environmental visualisation. I have so far been programming in ArcGIS (C++, and some VB, because I had to teach VB). I've been programming C++ for probably 5 years now or so. My next task will be to look into our own renderer which is based on OpenGL Performer. So, I would think that I can do quite similar tasks, I work for my 'real research work' and reuse some stuff for FG. However, the performer libraries are commercial, so I suspect that there is some more low level OpenGL demand here. I'm actually quite looking forward to play around with opengl, and maybe we can bring the scenery engine up to a standard that surpasses FS2K2, eg using bump-mapping on buildings / cockpits. I'm planning to use flight simulation stuff for my research in the long run, so I'm quite serious about all this. I'm quite interested into 'real world terrain training', and recognition of landmarks, etc. Finally, a good point to start would maybe be a bgl importer for FG, I have seen a webpage on that already, with my bgl knowledge it shouldn't be hard to get some decent advances in that field. What I would like to have a go at development wise (apart from converting my NZ data to FG scenery), is to improve the terrain in FG. If I'm informed right, FG uses TIN models (a big plus compared to FS2K2), so that's a good start. How is the LOD of the elevation mesh handled? I think FS2K2 uses a tree structure, but I found the ASD solution of Performer much more performance friendly (and looks better too). Some technical discussion on this issue would probably good. Next, how is the texturing handled? I assume using a tree structure and with different levels of LODs, ie mipmaps? What's really missing I think is a sort of blending between different texture classes. The squares I have seen in the screenshots look quite nasty, I think FS2K2 uses some bitmap strips as a mask to make this more realistic looking. I can have a closer look into that. Also, are seasons implemented? The bitmaps could also look better, but I know someone who made a complete replacement set of the FS2K2 textures as freeware, they look really good and I think I can maybe organise something there :). And finally, the new 'autogen' feature of FS2K2 is one of the features I really like. Having autogenerated 3D objects depending on land use textures is just great (looks good and gives you more of a feel of 'beeing there'). I can also have a look into how this works in detail. So, this was quite a long email. I know there's lots of stuff to do, but I'm looking quite forward to this new challenge. It should be more fun then these endless hours of trying to beat sense into some random hex code. Is there maybe a state of the art document for the terrain part, or will I have to just have a look at the source code and make some sense out of it? Looking forward to get involved here. Cheers, Christian _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
