Hello together. Now that I've found that the FlightGear source code does not have to be a "book with seven seals" for me and I was successfull with implementing my first, although small and simple, change to it, I got the idea to try a somewhat bigger modification to the program:
I'd like to do some experiments with displaying ground features like roads, rivers and land usage completely through (automatically generated) textures instead of the current material/triangle-based approach. I think that drawing these features totally indepentent of the underlying triangulation has several great advantages, with the following two being the most important ones: - It would offer the possibility of drawing more details and generally more "organic" ground features than it would ever be possible with the triangle/materials approach with its inevitable hard edges and performance limitations (no way to render zillions of triangles for all the smallest details) - It would uncouple the processes of generating and drawing all the "flat" ground features from the processes of generating and displaying the terrain mesh. This would allow us to modify and extend the complexity of displayed "flat" ground stuff completely without having to edit or regenerate the terrain mesh. New roads or other things could easily be added by modifying a roads vector dataset and regenerate the responsible ground texture tiles (or even by painting the road onto them with a graphics program). I know and admit that this approach also may have some quite big disadvantages, primarily performance problems because of limited hardware resources, and of course the feared "blurry ground at low altitudes" effect. I have no idea if I will ever get this to work (with acceptable results), I have no idea if it will be better than the current solution (and even accepted as such by the community), but anyway - I would just like to try it. Just for my own fun and interest, if you don't like it. Now why I'm writing this sermon: It would be great if someone who has good knowledge of these parts of FlightGear which are critical for this experiment could support me with answers to some questions which will surely arise. This first one, to which the definition of the whole challenge can be reduced as for now, is nothing more or less than the following: How can I implement an "override" for the current way of how the terrain triangles are textured, which allows me to look at each single triangle, identified by the world coordinates of its corner vertices, and map a defined part of an arbitrary texture file onto it? Like saying, I have an image file which represents a certain part of the world with four corners at specific lat/lon coordinates, and now I want FlightGear to render this image onto the ground at exactly this place in the virtual world. I hope my explaination can be understood and I'm looking forward to some helpful replies :) With best regards, Sebastian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
