On Sunday 2010-03-28 David Megginson wrote: > Now, quite a few years later, the Great Lakes are still > broken in our default scenery, and as a result, FlightGear > looks ridiculous to any new user who comes and tries flying > in near cities such as Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, > Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee.
Sometimes pictures really *are* worth a thousand words. I think this is one of those times. I've put up on the Web (temporarily: they won't be there forever) three screen snaps: Please go to http://www.vex.net/~slocombe/fgfs-pics-of-CYTZ/ for pictures illustrating the problems of CYTZ (Toronto/City Centre), which is on an island in Lake Ontario just offshore from Toronto's downtown area. 1. cytz-from-08-apprch.png : CYTZ from the approach viewpoint of Runway 08 (08/26 is the principal runway of this extremely busy airport: Bombardier Dash8-Q400's take off or land about every 20 minutes, and in between that traffic Cessna 150's and 172's practise circuits or transit to/from Toronto's "practice area" to the East. I'm one of the student pilots these days. The fact that, in fgfs, the water is 240 feet below its real-world level is only a small part of the problem (in fact if that were the only problem one could just pretend one is practising landings on aircraft carriers). The terrain data, intersected by the water at its current level, makes the shoreline wildly wrong... 2. cytz-overhead-at-40Kft.png : This is taken with the UFO tool at 40,000 ft., looking straight down. 3. google-image-cytz.png : a snap of what Google has for a satellite shot, to compare with the previous shot. I'm not convinced that the terrain data that fgfs uses is sufficiently detailed to capture even the approximate shape of the Toronto Islands (what CYTZ is on the Western end of), let alone the Leslie Spit and docklands to the East. So I'm not sure how different this is going to look if the water-level were correct. But surely it would make a difference, and there are > 700 miles of shoreline for Lake Ontario, and another > 800 miles for Lake Erie: all of this would be affected by a "fix". I presume the shoreline in the St. Lawrence River near Montreal must be seriously wrong too. BTW, Just For Kicks, I can fly *under* CYTZ. It doesn't seem to do me damage, and fgfs doesn't even crash! :-) Thanks everyone for the great achievement that fgfs is. It was fgfs that got me sufficiently enthused about flying to decide to get my PPL. David Slocombe Toronto Canada. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
