Frederic Bouvier wrote:
> As John said, the missing bit is scenery generation.
I think it's a split task. As with almost every technical problem,
there is _some_ way to a solution .... ;-)
I'm certain we'd find a reasonable way of nicely casting the new
X-Plane layouts into Terrain tiles without the triangle count or other
ressource requirements going through the roof - but this is most likely
letting us end up with something that FlightGear can't parse :-)
Basically (at the risk of triggering another pointless debate) I think
there are two problems to solve:
a) There would be the need for supporting more 'complex' geometries in
FlightGear Terrain, like polygons (at least) instead of triangles, at
least until shortly before the rendering stage, to save FlightGear from
sorting countless triangles just for one simple elevation lookup. An
alternative solution would be to make extremely high triangle counts
extremely cheap :-)
b) There would be the need for drawing line features, the yellow
taxiway lines in particular, _on_top_ of the existing runway, taxiway
or apron textures.
The funny side of the issue: We're not the only ones struggling with a
'proper' design for smooth airfield layouts:
Two years ago I've been working on a (I think rather small) side
project which involved using a custom airfield layout for in-house
research at NASA (Ames).
Beause they didn't have a proper solution for b) either, these folks
decided for their OpenFlight database to add a distinct layer
containing just the yellow lines - and to mount these approx. a dozend
centimeters above the tarmac .... resulting in the well-known z-buffer
fighting which you'd expect when placing flat geometries slightly above
the terrain surface :-)
As a consequence I suspect that most of the _infrastructure_ work for
properly supporting modern X-Plane formats would affect FlightGear. I
_do_ know that FlightGear is pretty much designed around having
triangulated Terrain, therefore I don't expect the current state to
change soon. The respective part in TerraGear might be comparably
small, but still would require a change to the file format (unless
extremely high triangle counts are becoming extremely cheap ;-))
Cheers,
Martin.
--
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