Hi, I am digging into terrain tiles creation in order to get a few airports layout more close to reality. I wonder if there's an alternative or if there's even space to experiment new ways in getting a highly customized geometry (especially for airport terrain meshes).
I am not very satisfied about the TaxiDraw/Terragear pipeline because of its limitations in the mesh creation technique. Using TaxiDraw rectangle blocks is not flexible enough to get proper custom geometry. I understand TerraGear is aimed at building airports layout from a specific data format and does not accept other kind of geometries for taxiway/runways/aprons. Since terrain meshes are based on triangles, I see full flexibility in that (more than what's used today). I guess rectangle blocks (I refer to taxiway/runway/aprons) were choosen in order to get airport layouts quick and easy (automatic texture mapping and lighting positioning from standard source data) but are not mandatory. I would not be surprised if someone tells me I could model my own airport mesh using any kind of geometry, texture it with custom image files, position lights (border, middle, PAPI etc...), windsocks and so on. All without being stuck to TaxiDraw/TerraGear limitations. Maybe TerraGear would be used anyway when compiling the custom mesh to a suitable .btg file, even if it does not come from a .dat TaxiDraw output? Well, what should I investigate for? I guess a good knowledge of the .btg file format would be a good first step, but ... here I get puzzled. I did find very few details on that. BTG stands for Binary TerraGear, right? Nothing more to know? Should I really read Terragear source code to get it clear? Should I search into Simgear docs? I'd really appreciate if someone could share some thoughts about this topic with me. I'd like to try and get a high quality airport layout and I'm open to not very standard approaches if needed. Curtis, I understand you are very busy with a lot of stuff, do you have any hints for me anyway? thanks, Roberto ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
