> Current terrain engine makes flights on high altitudes or long flights > on high speeds unreasonable. There is no Earth surface visible, only > blue fog, but lags very big, fps may drop to one per second or less, > simulation may crash on attempt to switch to other window and so on, > because it still loads some terrain even if it is invisible to pilot and > that terrain is unreasonably exact.
For the record, I'm not experiencing any of these problems when the visibility is ~ 100 km - the terrain is simply gone. But I think it would be nice to have an option to switch off the default terrain, to replace it by something else. As I indicated in the Forum http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12005 a solution to the problem would be to represent Earth from high altitude by pieces of a hires textured sphere (textures to be obtained from Celestia), with (at least as demo) a simple Nasal script controlling which pieces of the sphere are currently to be loaded. I did some experiments with a textured sphere and found that I can't simply place an Earth-sized sphere at the coordinate origin - the model is apparently deemed to be too far away and isn't shown. Maybe there is a simple way to switch this off - but if not, a viable solution would be to use a nearer (co-moving) sphere bit which is kept in the precise proportion to the real thing as given by simple ray optics. Using this trick, I have managed to get a plausible ufo-above-Earth view within 35 minutes work with a simple lowres (4096x4096) textured Earth. I believe all this is doable without significant modifications to the core. It may not be an elegant solution, but it can be picked up by anyone who is able to code a bit Nasal and can texture a model. Admittedly there are much more elegant solutions, and solutions which generalize to flights in the whole solar system, but I don't really see us getting started on that. Cheers, * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Simplify data backup and recovery for your virtual environment with vRanger. Installation's a snap, and flexible recovery options mean your data is safe, secure and there when you need it. Data protection magic? Nope - It's vRanger. Get your free trial download today. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
