I played around with some runway lighting today to see if textured polygons are feasible. Here is what textured, billboard runway lights look like : http://surgdom.hollosite.com/flightgear/screenshots/index.html
With 6 * 10000 ft runways all in view at one time my frame rate dropped from 50 down to 20 FPS on an old Ti 4200. I think 6 * 10000 ft runways should pretty much cater for any large airport. That's close to 5000 runway lights. This is just a hardcoded test to see what the performance impact is if one uses a brute force approach with zero performance enhancements. One could probably cull in between lights beyond certain distances which would help performance and look a bit better from a distance. Also I'm not sure what sort of impact billboarding and distance scaling has on performance - it would probably be faster if I had fixed polygons. If my Ti4200 can do the job then I'm sure newer video cards like the nVidia FX 5700 and up should handle these lights quite nicely. Paul _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
