Andy Ross writes: > This is mind bogglingly easy to fix. But what is the desired > behavior? What I want is a limit that will tell me when I've zoomed > to as far as a human pilot would actually be able to see from the > cockpit. > > What do you guys want? If you want to overzoom only from the > non-cockpit views (which aren't "realistic" anyway), then we can > predicate it on the current view number. If you want to ignore the > feature, we can make a simple preference property. If you want both, > then we need to decide on a more complicated interface. > > Again, IMHO it's a realism thing. Computer monitors don't have the > spacial resolution that an eye does, so we have to allow for zoom. > But pilots don't usually have telescopes in the cockpit, so it should > by default be limited to something approximating real life.
>From my perspective the issue is flexibility and differentiating between "policy" and "capabilities". I also don't think the "realism" argument should trump everything else. We do a *lot* of things for the sake of convenience. Is starting up in flight on a 7 mile final realistic? Is teleporting to the other side of the world realistic? Is accelerating time realistic? Is landing a helicopter on a 747 wing realistic? For that matter, is flying under a bridge something a person would realistically do in real life? Is being able to swivel my view (aka head) in multiple 360 degree circles a realistic thing? Perhaps it would be better not to answer that one. :-) There are a lot of cases where convenience, training value, or the limits of a PC computer will trump "realism". There is other cases such as fidelity of the flight dynamics where we do want realism to trump everything else. Then there are grey areas where it's not exactly clear. Do we always want to fly at the "real" time for our current location, or do we want to be able to control the time of day and choose night when it's day to practice night flying, or select day when it is night so we can do some nice sight seeing? I think it's very clever to be able to figure out the maximum real world resolution a pilot would have, but perhaps the little poppup message would say "overzoom xyz" when you get past the real world physical limitation. Being able to zoom way in is at least useful for taking screen shots and debugging scenery construction problems. In real life there exists some pretty amazing cameras and telescopes so it's not entirely unrealistic to allow arbitrary zooms. Even from a cockpit view you might consider that a passenger has some super telephoto lens on their camera, and the air is still, etc. Maybe we want to some day simulate the camera view from a UAV. It's not inconceivable that such a camera would have significant telephoto abilities and be mounted on some sort of gyro stabilization platform. 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
