On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote: > Hi all! > > Calling something a major release is not just a matter of "what's possible", > but also "what's done". > > There's a lot possible with Rembrandt, but 99% of our aircraft don't use it. > And lots of aircraft look ugly with Rembrandt > (non-translucent windows and fake shadows mostly). I just checked the few > aircraft that I remember being included in the base > package: only one has Rembrandt lights (c172p)!
A very good point, and one I hadn't considered in depth. > I'm afraid we will get a forum-tsunami when we promote this release with > "support for real time generated shadows and lights", > if even the majority of the base package's aircraft aren't showing how nice > it can look... Rembrandt has been around for quite a few months now, and the changes required to make an aircraft Rembrandt-compatible are pretty small, even if the changes to add proper lights are more involved. If I was being harsh I'd suggest that the aircraft maintainers should "man up and do it". There's still plenty of time before the release... > On our IRC channel, someone brought up the idea of including Rembrandt in > the release, but not mentioning it (explicitly) in > the changelog/press-release; and thus versioning it 2.8.0. That'll keep the > expectations low, and allow aircraft developers to > spend some months (till the next release) on getting their aircraft > Rembrandt-ready. As we don't update the aircraft downloads > in-between releases, users need to wait till the next release anyway before > they can download a fair number of Rembrandt-ready > aircraft... You make a very good argument for 2.8.0 rather than 3.0.0. I think we should still mention Rembrand in the release note. I think it's perfectly reasonable to talk about it as a development feature that has still to be supported by all aircraft and shaders. I really don't like the idea of not including it in the changelog. After all, we want people to become excited by it and update aircraft/shaders etc. > The next release could then be called 3.0.0. This would be in line with the > Plib-OSG switch. The OSG transition started with 1.9.0. > That release was a "step back", as we lost shadows, 3D clouds etc. The > period thereafter was spent on bringing back some of the > features (eg. 3D clouds) and allowed developers to get used to the new > possibilities (shaders). FlightGear 2.0.0 was then released > with the key-sentence: "FlightGear 2.0.0 reflects the maturation of the > OpenSceneGraph". I'm not sure that is correct, but my memory is dim. My recollection was that even after we converted the main cvs branch to OSG, we kept a plib branch that was used for a subsequent release. -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
