I have two questions to which I'd like to gather a few opinions: 1) Emilian pointed out here http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=17114&hilit=procedural+texturing&start=30#p165312 that terrain textures are a fair share of memory consumption and concluded that we shouldn't use multiple choices of textures in the materials file - for instance we assign sand1.png, sand2.png and sand3.png to the same landclass). I don't know what the original rational for this was. It leads to a modest reduction in tiling since the base texture is changed every 10 km or so, but all in all I don't see dramatic visual improvements. It also leads to some more variety in the textures encountered.
Both advantages seem increasingly obsolete to me, so I largely agree with Emilian. Procedural texturing allows to suppress tiling much more efficiently, and regional texturing exposes the user to a great variety of different textures in various places of the world. Hence my question - are there objections against phasing out the use of multiple textures per landclass in my future modifications of /regions/materials.xml, or are there reasons to keep them I haven't seen? /default/materials.xml will still be left untouched for anyone who prefers the old style. 2) There has been a discussion here http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=17879 to try to get the shader to do autumn colors automatically. The most efficient way I can see to do that without significant extra cost is to use the texture alpha channel (terrain textures are never transparent, so that is freely available) to encode which parts of the texture should be color-rotated how much (it doesn't do to get bright red needle-cover...). The advantage is that this is a fast and efficient scheme because no extra texture sheets need to be loaded or prepared. The disadvantage is that it will make our terrain textures look odd and not very user-friendly to edit. Any opinions on if we should try to test this or not? Thanks, * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
