On 3 Oct 2008, at 15:06, James Turner wrote: >> >> I think this code is "original." At one point Mark Harris' clouds >> were in the >> tree, but they proved to be to expensive for the machines of the >> day, AIUI; the >> current code is a simplification of that. > > Okay, that's not my recollection of the early history of this code, > but it was a long time ago. I've actually grabbed Mark Harris' code as > well, just out of curiosity, because my suspicion is that it might be > very amenable to a pixel shader implementation, and that the OSG > community would be interested in a stand-alone cloudKit. The machines > listed in his paper and docs are extremely moderate by today's > standards - eg he mentions a P3/geforce2 configuration as being able > to run the demo acceptably. Of course that's just the clouds alone I > suspect :)
Right, done some more reading, Stuart's patch makes more sense now, in the context of the existing code. I'll take a look at making some code changes over the next few days, though I'm also battling some other (ongoing, OSG related) issues with builds I compile myself. This should not stop anyone else who feels interested taking a look, and it's not a promise to get this working. I'm also increasingly convinced that the kernel of Mark Harris' original code is actually quite small (despite the huge size of the .zip) and suitable for efficient rendering on modern hardware. It's effectively a hyper-dense, slow-changing particle system (as is Harald's technique, of course) with a funky lighting model. Porting to OSG, and integrating it with the Simgear cloud system is another matter, so it's worthwhile getting the existing clouds 3D ported to OSG in any case. Comments on any of the above are welcome. James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
