On 11/1/07, David Megginson wrote:
>
> Excellent. It looks like a good start, but there is a strange culture
> around the site -- for example, you have to request a download instead
> of simply downloading the source, even though it seems to have a
> BSD-style license. I wonder if most of the developers are coming from
> the Windows world, and don't quite get the norms of open source yet.
I've followed the vterrain project from a distance for quite some time now.
I believe they were around way back when we were first designing our own
terrain engine.
I believe Ben was originally working under some sort of funding or grant
(from Intel?) so he had one foot in the open-source world and one foot in
the commercial/research/funding world. Since then, I believe he's doing
this entirely on his own now, but I'm sure much of the culture of the
project is affected by it's origins (and maybe he does consulting in the
field and wants to have some protection and control over his tools?)
One of the great things about the vterrain site is they collect links to
just about every plausible approach for doing terrain, collect links to
data, collect links to other useful algorithms and tools, etc. etc.
That said, I'll echo what Tim said earlier. Even though there is a lot of
*great* terrian work going on the world, most of it is not optimize for
flight simulator use. Some schemes break down when you want to page tiles
in and out and create an endless/seamless virtual world. Many schemes are
flat world only. Some approaches don't handle this idea of cutting
features/holes into the world so you can insert things like airports or
other separately modeled details. Some of these schemes might not have a
good ability to query altitude at any arbitrary point, or they might take an
approach to rendering that doesn't fit well within flightgear (i.e.
integrating clouds, sky, and other models into their approach.) The
proponants of any particular scheme will quickly point out how easy it is
for their scheme to handle all our needs, and that may be the case, but it
still is a lot of work to get from point A to point B.
I'm probably sounding overly negative here. But to go from one of these
impressive and cool looking demos, to something that can serve as a flight
simulator scenery rendering engine is probably going to be a stunning amount
of work. Certainly we could and should take a look at cleaning up the
scenery render engine API within FlightGear. It started out very clean, but
over the years it's become much more intertwined with every things else.
Even though there will be hard work to adapt or create a new scenery engine
for flightgear, I've always wanted an environment where it is possible to
drop in a new scenery engine. I want to encourage anyone who is interested
in these sorts of things to go full speed ahead.
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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