On 14 Jan 2009, at 16:00, Curtis Olson wrote: > My sense is that there are many areas in the world where the slope > of the shore line is very shallow. Also don't forget that our SRTM > data has a resolution / random noise element of about +/- 5 to 10 > meters. I think that these things combined together could lead to > some extremely inaccurate shorelines and odd contour artifacts if we > try to physically model the water level and the terrain elevation to > create a shoreline. > > It's a neat idea and certainly could be worthwhile territory to > explore, but I'm pretty sure it will yield highly inaccurate > shorelines with ugly artifacts in many areas of the world. And > there are many hidden dangers I would think. If we get the ocean > level off by a meter or two and the land off by a meter or two, we > could have unintended side effects such as putting all of KSFO under > water at high tide.
Sadly I tend to agree with Curt - while it sounds easy to create nice shaders for water, it's not worth it if it puts SFO / London / Florida under water. The reason I first thought of this was flying over the Wash (huge tidal flats) enroute to Schiphol a few months ago - looking at the sunlight reflected on the wet surface, and thinking 'that's got to be doable with a shader or environment map'. (Right now the Wash doesn't really show up in FG) Of course, for every place with tide flats, there's another with sheer cliffs - and so we return to, it's all about the data. 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
