>
>
> While the unrealistic behaviour in loops can't really be cured, it could
> be lessened by doing what nature does - using more cloudlets with less
> features (up-down distinction) and build cloud structure not by texture
> but by positioning selected cloudlets with better control. That would need
> a factor of maybe 20-100 more cloudlets per cloud.
>
> This is probably right on.
> With the resources of a current PC in the Flightgear environment, you can
> have 5000-10000 cloudlets, i.e. you'd be limited to 50 Cumulus clouds in
> the sky or so. I concluded that under these circumstances, fixing the
> aerobatics problem is not worth pursuing. You can experiment with building
> clouds that way - the local weather menu point has a 'cloudbox' entry,
> that is designed to build such many-cloudlet clouds (you may have to edit
> a bit of you want different textures).
>
I've been looking at the clouds code again recently, which is oddly slow on
my "monster" machine (Phenom II x6, GTX 460) . It has the same problem that
the trees code did before a big makeover: it uses instancing techniques on
geometry (flat quads) that is to far simple to be treated as an instance. It
would be much better to take the same approach we do in trees and treat a
cloud as a list of quad or triangle polygons. The messy part is the distance
sorting that is not optional for the cloud sprites.
It would be nice to have a GPU-based particle system that did the clouds,
smoke, etc., but we don't yet.
>
> I have cooked up also schemes with static (non-rotated models) clouds -
> these would have none of the above problems, but the trouble is that
> Flightgear (OSG?) doesn't display a stack of multiple semi-transparent
> surfaces correctly if they are not exactly parallel - so these schemes
> don't work.
>
> This is more of an OpenGL / graphics hardware problem. There are schemes to
do order-independent transparency, but it's hard to see the benefits of
rewriting the entire renderer to take advantage of them.
> So unless
>
> Cheers,
>
> * Thorsten
>
>
>
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