> Computing constant values at runtime is bad design and we should not do > that. No matter if we notice a significant increase in load time now or > not. The ground elevation at a specific point is well known at scenery > generation time and that is where the vertical position of an object has > to be computed. Not in the main loop at the moment of scenery loading > where computing time is precious.
Just my two cents from a mere scenery user perspective... I think I understand where the idea comes from - like the floating tanks in Seattle Int. Say someone wants to populate an airport with buildings - there's the real layout and there is the Flightgear default scenery layout - which are sometimes quite distinct (think of places like Courchevel or Alpe d'Huez where the default layout, especially in terms of elevation, is *really* off). He can get closer to the real layout by using custom scenery where it exists (as in the case of Seattle) and place objects at their actual position, but when this is submitted to the scenery database, the objects float or sink. So, people would like to populate close to the 'real' layout, but still do something useful for the scenery database I guess, and it would be nice to have a way to automatically place objects at a plausible elevation for people who use default scenery and for those why use custom scenery. Determining elevation runtime would do that - but there may be other ways of achieving the same result - maybe alternative object positions can be computed at custom scenery creation time and shipped with the custom scenery file, overwriting the default declarations? I don't know how to make this work in practice, but perhaps the discussion should focus on how objects can be placed plausibly with minimum manual effort under the assumption that there are users which use custom scenery and users which use default scenery in the same place without making the computations runtime? (I am well aware of the individual patches of custom scenery vs. a single global scenery effort debate and that my suggestion effectively is to support custom scenery better which may not be in line with the official policy - but I appreciate the huge difference in experiencing Courchevel in the default and in the custom version, and I would not want to miss that experience). * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
