On 14 Jan 2009, at 11:16, Martin Spott wrote: >> As far as I know - there's no diference between solid and liquid >> surfaces >> from FG/SG point of view. In other words >> - rivers, lakes, ocean are a part of TerraGear scenery (except >> OceanTiles >> for non existent BTG-s of course). > > Right, in the current Terrain file format we just define a surface > type > name and leave it to FlightGear to look the characteristics up in the > 'materials.xml' file. > Note that we're currently dealing with at least two different types of > 'water areas', "Lake" and "Ocean", and we're telling between different > seasons. Thus, whichever approach you're taking, please don't simply > rely on water areas being represented by "Ocean". One day we might > even > define the surface characteristics in the Terrain tiles instead of > looking up in the 'materials.xml' ....
I've idly wondered about pulling the water out of the generated scenery, and instead creating 'ground' down to the low tide line. The water surface could then be created at runtime, allowing for tides, waves, and other effects depending on the GPU/CPU power available. For this to work, we'd need some way to extrapolate the coastal gradient down to the low water mark, which I suppose is tricky. Then there's the issue of tidal rivers - again I guess our shoreline / river data doesn't encode the high and low- water lines. Oh, and there's the 'Holland' problem as well - so there needs to be some way to clip out the water surface - possibly the same way lakes would be handled, though. James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
