Hi Martin, I also find it rather interesting to read something about the 'invisible' work behind the scenery - thank you for letting us know. It's sometimes difficult to appreciate the work that is not directly seen, and it helps a lot if you tell us.
Thanks for the hard work. However, there is one sentence in your descriptions which I did not like, because it expresses a sentiment which I do not like at all about the Flightgear community. Please let me take the time to explain. The sentence I mean is > This sort > of "Scenery development" is substantially different from craving for > aaah's and oooh's on The Forum after you successfully managed to follow > an elaborate and nicely illustrated recipe on how to build FlightGear > Terrain. I don't know for a fact what you want to imply, but it reminds me of something for example Vivian expressed a while ago with regard to judging cockpits by visual detail. Vivian wrote: > I would suggest that as such it has little > value for a Flight Sim such as ours which values accuracy above all else. > Bit of fun for the forum though. Let me now speak more to the audience at large, rather than to Martin personally... In both statements I read the following ideas (I don't know if you literally meant that - but that's what came across) * while the mailinglist is for real work, the forum is just for playing around * consequently, while the forum can be impressed by cheap tricks and eye candy, the 'real' development community cares about more important things such as accuracy Let me take a virtual needle and deflate the claims a bit. Until recently, Flightgear's idea of a weather change was that pressure, wind and visibility instantly jump from one value to another. Hardly what I would call accuracy. Doing it differently by means of an interpolation isn't even technically complicated (my 1/d weighted routine was 40 lines or so) or would require terrible computing power - there was just nobody sufficiently interested before 2.0.0 came out. Or, as Emmanuel Baranger has pointed out repeatedly, the fact the JSBSim planes can frequently land on water can hardly be called accurate. I could go on, but I think my point is clear - the Flightgear development community doesn't value accuracy as such, but each of you has some notion of where he would like to have more accuracy, and each of you has areas where he doesn't care about increased accuracy (for me, something like convective clouds behaving differently over water than over land is terribly important - having learned to fly gliders, I actually make use of the clues provided by the clouds... On the other hand, instruments not being precisely where they are in the original is not so important to me). So, by what argument can Vivian really claim that she values accuracy higher than I do, when she has been fine with throwing the physics of convective clouds out? I just can't see that any notion of accuracy is better than the other, and I think it's just plain wrong to think that way that one group of people likes accuracy and the other eye candy - visual detail is just another aspect of accuracy. So instead of alienating people who care about modelling, texturing, reflection shaders for exterior models and such things by referring to all that as 'fun for the forum', I think you'd be much better off by encouraging these people to improve the aspects they are interested in and kindly teaching them to value also the aspects which are important to you personally. Frankly, the elitist attitude expressed in such sentences bothers me. I feel much more welcome in the forum - and as a result I usually write much more of my observations, progress reports and ideas in the forum. I also usually get as good response as I get here. So if you only read the list, there's lots of info which you're missing. Doesn't have to bother anyone here - maybe it's just not interesting to you personally. But I think it's be way more useful to encourage people to help (there's plenty to do after all) than to regard them all as not seriously enough. So, now what happens - a few folks get involved, follow the elaborate and nicely illustrate recipe how to do things and actually produce scenery - to hear that what they do is just 'craving for aaah's and oooh's on The Forum', as opposed to 'the real thing'. Well - just how charming and encouraging is that? I happen to enjoy the custom France, custom Ireland and custom Eastern Europe sceneries. For me, an existing imperfect scenery is worth more than a non-existing perfect scenery which I may be able to use in the future. As far as I am concerned, the involved parties have earned their 'aahs and oohs' (so has Martin). So, I would prefer much if we could get around to respecting the work of others more - even if it's not what we are personally most interested. And to kindly teaching each other to appreciate the aspects of realism we value most, rather than considering anyone not sharing our personal sentiment what needs to be accurate as not serious enough. Merry Christmas to you all! * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forrester recently released a report on the Return on Investment (ROI) of Google Apps. They found a 300% ROI, 38%-56% cost savings, and break-even within 7 months. Over 3 million businesses have gone Google with Google Apps: an online email calendar, and document program that's accessible from your browser. Read the Forrester report: http://p.sf.net/sfu/googleapps-sfnew _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
