Hello all,
Since this is my first post here, I'll quickly introduce myself. My name is
Jan Comans and I am currently a PhD student at the Delft University of
Technology with the Control and Simulation (C&S) department. My main focus
is on Human-Machine Interaction. Next to my main research, every now and
then I spend some time on FlightGear. We have been looking at using
FlightGear for a while, but haven't been using it a lot up until now.
However, in the past couple of weeks ( after a graphics card update for our
simulator) we started working with FlightGear 2.8.
I was planning on sending a message about our work somewhere in the next
weeks, but apparently somebody already picked up on our public Gitorious
repository. So today I met with Gijs de Rooij. We showed him what we are up
to and he gave us some insight into where FlightGear is heading.
Afterwards, I figured that other people might also interested in what we
do, so I'll try to give a short overview.
Here at the C&S department, among a number of facilities, we are operating
a full motion research simulator which we call SIMONA (
http://www.lr.tudelft.nl/en/cooperation/facilities/simona/the-simona-research-simulator/).
In terms of software, it is driven by a custom middle ware layer developed
in-house. All simulation projects are built on top of this layer which
mainly handles communication and activation. A lot of what we do doesn't
require fancy graphics, but for some projects we need an actual descent
outside visual. Up until now we mainly used a custom scene graph with a
model of Schiphol surrounded by some patches of grass.
About a year ago we started experimenting with FlightGear 2.4 for our
outside visuals. This already improved the graphics quite a bit. Also
around that time we met with a few people from FlightGear at the FS Weekend
in Lelystad (we had an interesting talk with Mathias Frohlich I believe).
But after this, we didn't really put any more time in.
A few weeks ago now, we upgraded our three image generators that are
responsible for the 180 degree wide outside visual. With this new hardware
in place, we started to look at FlightGear again. About a week ago, we ran
our first demo with FlightGear 2.8. I have some really bad cell phone
pictures at https://picasaweb.google.com/102074366036110280261/FlightGear#.
With all eye-candy on, we get a decent frame rate (50+) and amazing
graphics.
We did have one issue tough with our setup. Since we run three different
instances on three different machines, we got clouds which weren't
consistent across the screen. We fixed this with a small hack in the random
number generator and the cloud rendering code. It's not pretty, but does
the job for now. If you're interested, it is in my gitorious repository:
https://gitorious.org/csflightgear. In the next few weeks, we will
be fiddling a bit more with the setup and might do some further tweaking.
If I have more problems, workarounds, tweaks, ... I'll let you know about
it. And we are of course interested in feedback from you all should you
should you see something you like or don't like.
I guess that's more than enough for now. If there would be any questions or
you would like more info don't hesitate to contact me.
Best regards,
Jan
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