On Monday 01 December 2003 23:34, Paul Surgeon wrote: > Detail textures help but I they are not the answer. > What is needed is new terrain rendering engine. :D > > I'm sure there will be protesters but this "polygonal" looking scenery is > not very nice in my opinion. Yes it works but it doesn't even begin to > resemble real life scenery.
100 % ACK There are also good reasons why we should go for eye candy. A few days ago i visited a fan forum about the MS flight simulator and asked those people there how they like Flightgear and how they think about it. I also asked them if they want to help make it better. (many MS flight simulator users create world scenerys for the MS FS in their free time and give them away for free) The typical answer was, that they like the idea of an open source flight simulator and wishes us good luck, but they won't use it because they want to see something on their computer when flying around. And as long as they won't use it their interest in helping making the world scenery of flightgear better is very low. So when flightgear gets more eye candy by improving the graphic engine we will get a lot more people supporting flightgear with sceneries, addons and things like that. And if we ever want to have so many world wide sceneries for flightgear like MS's FS does have we will need a better graphical engine that can improve the image qualtity up to the limits of the computer hardware. If we have a good rendering engine, this project will get a lot more support from others, you can bet on that it's like a snowball system. If we don't improve the rendering engine, we will have to create our world scenery alone for years until we reach the level those millions of users have with MS flight simulator today. For example those screenshots on that website show a freeware scenery of the city Hamburg that is made by FS2004 users: http://forum.webmart.de/wmmsg.cfm?id=876695&d=30&sr=76&a=1&t=1653562 Now take a look at those pictures and tell me if we really want to create every city part for part on our own when others could help us a lot faster? Don't understand me wrong, but compared to the MS FS fan base we are just too few people. To summarise it, Flightgear needs to get more attractive to get a larger fan base which will result in more and better sceneries. > It would not work for the way the current scenery engine works but it would > work for aerial/satelite scenery. > In the case of aerial/satelite scenery the scenery engine only has to cache > the textures it needs. That would only be the textures in visible range. < Then also factor mip mapping in and your memory consumption drops drastically. > Think along the lines of about 57MB for 400 km2 with the terrain directly > under the aircraft at 1 meter/pixel resolution and then gradually tappering > off to 8 meters/pixel in 5 steps to a distance of 10 km in all directions > from the aircraft. > Then we haven't even started to discuss stuff like S3TC texture compression > which can drop the texture size down to about 10MB. :) I like that idea very much, especially when imaging how flightgrear would look with a 1 meter/pixel resolution. :) I also want to ask, when keeping in mind that you want to start rewriting the rendering engine from scratch how far could you extend it? Last week i posted some links to documentation about planet rendering that makes heavily use of LOD (Level of Detail) features. How far could such a thing be implemented in a new rendering engine for flightgear? Could it be possible to create a rendering engine that allows us to fly from the ground up into space seamlessly? Many flight simulators have their limits at around 50000 feet altitude so it would be great if we are able to fly higher in flightgear. >> A new terrain renderer would be great. But it's *not* easy. > > No kidding! That's why I'm doing all my proof of concept development outside > of FG. No point in trying to implement something that I'm not sure will work > properly/fast enough. How is the progress? I am a complete newbie in OpenGL but if i can help you somehow on that, just tell me. Best Regards, Oliver C. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
