Durk Talsma wrote: > Curtis L. Olson wrote: > >> Martin Spott wrote: >> >>> The triangles don't have to be changed at all because in our Scenery >>> the tidal area is part of the ocean. The idea was about changing >>> nothing but the colour, >>> >> >> >> Ok, so you are only talking about areas that are marked explicitly as >> tidal areas in our land use/land cover data base, and then they would >> be either at full tide or no tide ... that's probably simpler to manage. >> >> Curt. >> > I like the idea. Having some real-life experience flying over the > "wadden" area that Martin (Doege) referred to, I can tell that the low > tide areas can be very scenic. A change in texture would indeed > suffice, because the elevation differences are almost negligable.
Basically, you could model a "tidal area" as a triangle mesh (as detailed as you like) where the triangle type is "tidal" and each triangle also carries a parameter "X" which is the local tide-height at which that triangle is covered by water. A tide-calculator finds local tide-height in a slow-running background loop, and every iteration of that loop, all triangles where X < tide-height are textured as "water", otherwise as "sand" (or mud). What's nice about that approach is that you can model tidal reaches with whatever detail you want. It could just be "tide in"/"tide out" as suggested by Curt (above) or vastly complex, handling the water flows of mudflats like the "wadden" area or Mont St. Michel. I've been interested in tides for years, and although 'Xtide' has now appeared (which outdoes my efforts), I've been offering a tide calculator program on my website for years: see http://tallyho.bc.nu/~steve/tides.html The underlying maths is very much simplified compared with Xtide, but would be fine for Flightgear. Help yourselves if you want it! Steve. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
