David Megginson wrote: > Andy Ross writes: > > This panel isn't quite right, though. The center attitude indicator > > isn't a flat card, but is in fact a rotating globe. > > This might be a good time to mention that we have an alternative > method for creating panels. 3D models can now include other 3D models
You ever have one of those days where you think of a cute idea, casually code it up to try it, and discover that it works better than you'd have ever expected? It's been a good day. Check out A-4 panel. It isn't quite done, clearly: + It's so close to the near clip plane that the precision errors cause nasty jittering; this happens to the rest of the cockpit geometry too. Honestly, I think this is probably unavoidable. We should really look at solutions for drawing the cockpit into a separate depth range from the terrain. On the other hand, it's kinda nifty to be able to zoom in to the cockpit in the outside view and see thins thing on the panel. + The cockpit geometry is kind of whacked. :) It wasn't really intended for viewing at 1m, so it doesn't quite fit. I had to shrink the ball down to about 4 inches in order to make it look right in combination with the virtual cockpit's default plane, which is itself kind of whacked (I know, I know, I really need to fix that). Again, I think we should consider allowing for separating a cockpit scene graph from the aircraft model and terrain. + We need an enclosure for it, with roll indicators, cross hairs and a turn ball before it'll be truly useful. I'm hoping someone with more 3D skill than I is willing to try to make the box. :) + At 192 triangles and 6 128x128 textures, this is an expensive instrument. There were no significant effect on frame rate on my machine, but we can't be sprinkling gadgets like this around the panel without hurting someone. + It's exposed some strange behavior in the lighting code -- the specular highlights at night (I know, specular highlights at night?) are way to bright, and there is an odd "popping" behavior as the vertices enter shadow. I think this might be a bug in plib; I haven't investigated. + This one really annoys me: the AC3D file format apparently doesn't allow you to specify normals explicitly, it wants to calculate them itself. This works fine for the vertices inside the texture, but texture boundaries show up as sharp edges because the polygons in separate objects don't share their coincident vertices. Combined with the specular highlight issue, this can look very strange. Is there a better file format? I know SSG has a native one. This sounds great, but I couldn't find an ounce of documentation on it, even in the code that parses it. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
