This is just a thought, and since I'm definitely no expert at the internals, please feel free to bash the idea. This seems like a possibly reasonable way to add other elements to the scenery, such as buildings, towers, bridges, roads, etc. I'm just a college kid, haven't actually worked on anything major, haven't done massive amounts of research Flightgear or otherwise, and have been interested in Flightgear for a few years. The following has probably been tried, and discarded, but bear with me.
Why not use a secondary scenery file, something that works a bit like an overlay. Example, a building, in this case, lets make it a cube (nice and regular :) Set the bottommost point (a centerpoint, if you will) in the center of the x-y plane. The z setting of this point will be at ground level (if it's halfway up the building, the part of the building below the point should be buried). A vector in the building data to point north (or other standard direction, like down or up) to make sure the building gets shown in the right orientation. Now for the magic (or something): Take the ground level of the scenery at the centerpoint of the object, and make that the altitude of the z coordinate of the object. Unless there were an inordinate/complicated amount of scenery, that might be a solution. It's similar to the dynamic scenery, except the locations of objects are predefined. Roads could be done in a slightly different way, such as a network of lines (I'm probably just proposing what's already been done). The endpoints are given as lat/lon. Since roads almost always follow the terrain (except for over/underpasses, tunnels, and other cuts through the terrain, the same "map the ground level to the z coordinate" idea should work for roads. Realistically, I don't see why a secondary package can't take a pregenerated ground scenery file, extract the required information with some overlay source information, and create an overlay file with all of the required information in some sensible format (after all, roads are just two points connected by a line). This overlay could even be optional, in case someone wishes to use a pristine scenery set. JD Alex Perry wrote: > > James A. Treacy writes: > > > This brings up something I've been wondering for a while. It appears we > > > can add roads and rivers. Why, then, isn't this the default? > > David replies: > > Unfortunately, to get roads, railroads, and rivers, we have to give up > > some quality in the terrain mesh. You don't notice much in flat > > terrain, but sometimes the mountains come out looking funny. > > Can we do it on a tile-by-tile basis ? If the range of altitude from > minimum to maximum (in one tile) is less than 200 ft then do roads because > the terrain will look essentially flat from any sensible altitude. > > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
