Paul Surgeon writes: > I'm sure this subject has been brought up plenty of times but I > think it would be great to compile a list of all the features that > we need the FG terrain rendering system to support.
Norman Vine writes: > > - Ability to cut in polygon models of airports. > > Any cut in polygons respect tile boundaries > i.e a polygon can only be in one tile It's easy to chop up polygons on tile boundaries, but you are probably referring to airport areas. :-) > > - Ability to page terrain / textures so continuous flights around the > > world are still possible. > > :-) I only say this because I've seen a lot of ROAM type demos that look cool for a small area, but I get the sense that it's a bit trickier to build an entire seamless earth. It's probably been done in commercial games (?) but I haven't seen this done in the open souce world. Just a word of advice ... if you are building a scheme and run across some oversite and are tempted to think, "what are the chances of seeing this case in real life." Believe me, when you throw all the data of the world at your scheme, you'll see it a lot more than you expected. :-) Modeling the entire world is a good way to keep yourself honest. :-) > I think we could make the current scheme work as the only thing changing > will be the local 'Z' and height calculations would be *much* > simpler We have to be careful though of objects floating up and down "noticable" as the underlying terrain LOD changes. > We still need polygons to shape the terrain for roads, rivers etc. during > scenery creation and then there are the airports. My understanding is that roads, rivers, lakes, cities, etc. (all that stuff we handle with 2d polygons right now) could be embedded in the aerial photos / textures that we are draping over the terrain, so there would be no need to cut them in as polygons. Airports are a bit different though ... unless we have *really* high res data as in less than 1 foot per pixel, we'll want to still model this polygonally. The San Jose demo was interesting, but it still needed better resolution. Just one airport area could easily consume a Gb of texture ram if we wanted to use a "nice" resolution. But that still wouldn't address all the squashed buildings, and all the nice aircraft painted on the runways in various stages of taxiing, landing, and taking off. Also, you get everything shaded from one particular time of day. There are tradeoff's to every approach. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
