[Flightgear-devel] Tides in FlightGear?

[Martin Doege]

Hi!

Something important I have been missing in FG when flying over the North Sea is the effect of tides, i.e. the areas close to the coast falling dry at low tide. I realize that there are not many parts of the world where a low tide causes the sea to recede significantly, but in the Wadden Sea and at the Atlantic coast of France around Mt. St. Michel this is quite dramatic and certainly noticeable from the air.

Now as far as I understand the FG scenery, the surface that represents the sea is fixed at the mean sea level. So what I have been thinking, would it be possible to put a few mud-colored rectangles on top of the sea level plane that grow and shrink (by morphing linearly between a "low tide" and a "high tide" size) according to tide? Or could the FG rendering engine be told to somehow texture the mudflats differently from the sea, so that no extra objects would be required?

Of course the tide calculations would not be required to be extremely accurate à la xtide -- the hour angle of the Moon would probably be quite sufficient as a broad indication of tide.

Martin