Local Weather is now (almost) in the shape I would like to see in the release, and I've worked quite a bit through the list of issues:
> 1) Local Weather places clouds at the wrong altitude. I've corrected that. > 2) The GUI is not consistent with the system (I will fix that) A new gui combines all needed option and in principle obsoletes the Local Weather config. Problem: After on-demand loading of Nasal modules was introduced, the Local Weather Config menu contained the checkbox which determined if it should be loaded or not and if the Local Weather menu item was accessible at all - where should this go if the config menu item is removed? > 3) High-altitude single-layer non-rotated clouds get shaded when the > ground gets shaded (I verified that they are subject to > /rendering/scene/saturation, but I believe I can undo this dependency in > the model xml wrapper - I'll try to deal with it) The correct solution to that turned out to write a shader for static clouds (much like the rain layer - in fact I could have used the rain layer shader with different parameters, but I chose not to because I forsee the use of a different fog function and different lighting for rain and high-altitude clouds). In addition, these clouds are moved to render bin 9. This seems to get the correct depth ordering and apparently also removes a lot of transparency artefacts I have been seeing previously. > 4) Clouds now appear to be loaded in discrete lumps when they come into > visual range rather than gradually be faded in via transparency which > looks a bit ugly from high altitude - Stuart, is this intentional and a > performance-related issue? I have verified that the corresponding tile is > already loaded, so it's not something my part of the system does. With GIT pulled just before Xmas, I still see a hard-coded limit of ~20 km cloud visibility range which makes impossible for me to test layers appearance from above properly. This is very annoying, I hope the underlying problem is identified and fixed soon. > 5) Changing the cloud density slider with LW clouds in the scene still > erases all clouds for me. Imho, would be a net option to have. Stuart, > what are your plans? Will not be addressed for 2.6. > 6) External rain textures are visible through clouds from above, Moving them to render bin 9 solves the issue for good. > 7) Similar problem with non-rotated high-altitude clouds - they are > always > drawn in front of any other clouds, which looks silly when you see them > through a low overcast layer. See above. > 8) Local Weather has no precipitation rendering. This is due to the fact > that the system uses its own layer altitude definition and a 3d > definition > of where rain is falling, whereas the precipitation rendering system uses > a lowest altitude criterion. Since lowest layer altitude is always zero > when local weather is running (it uses its own cloud altitude management > and since clouds need to be placed with offset to the layer, it's easiest > to make that layer zero) Local Weather has never rain unless you fly to > the dead sea (not much chance of rain there either...). > > Could someone please provide a dumb rain and snow flag which always > renders rain when that flag is set and leave it to the weather system to > set/unset that flag as it sees fit? Still to be fixed. I tried a workaround using negative cloud altitudes with respect to a very high layer, but Stuart's system doesn't accept that, so I really can't fix this myself. > 9) Water shader (very impressive!!!) doesn't react to wind/overcast in > Local Weather. Vivian, Emilian - at some point we discussed an interface > of how to pass the situation to the shader. Technically it's really easy > for me to write in any form you like - just tell me where you want to > pick > up that info. The current implementation works by writing into the Global Weather config which does the trick. Let me know as soon as a different interface is in place and I'll change the code accordingly. > 10) Skydome scattering shader - is now basically broken in overcast > situations when visibility is low, because the clouds fade rapidly but > the shader doesn't react, so more blue sky is seen when visibility > goes down. I have a working (slow) seamless version of the terrain haze shader with recent GIT, so the shader continues to be maintained even if it doesn't make it into 2.6. I've also found and fixed a few bugs. Recent version of Local Weather (still lacks updated documentation), please test: http://users.jyu.fi/~trenk/files/local_weather_1.4.tgz Current version of the haze shader: http://users.jyu.fi/~trenk/files/terrain-haze-23_12_2011.tgz (use a separate GIT branch, because it overwrites several default files - also doesn't work properly with global weather or any other shaders) Cheers, * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
