On Sunday, January 20, 2013 19:17:18 Renk Thorsten wrote: > > Well, if you ask in that way, then the question is: > > Do we need 10 different flavours of rock? > > If we want to look a scene roughly as it would in the location, the answer > is yes - volcanic rock on Hawaii looks very different from Alpine rock in > France. Rock in Iran looks very different again. > > If we're happy with one recognizable generic fast-rendering look for > Flightgear, the answer is no. > > Personally I'm in the first camp. > > The problem is that there's always somebody unhappy. People are unhappy > because the base package download size is large, so we'd not want any more > textures. People are unhappy because FG doesn't look like FSX, so we'd want > better texturing. People are unhappy because framerates are bad, so we'd > want less GPU load. People are unhappy because <insert name of game here> > has grass moving in the wind and FG has not, so we'd want more fancy > effects. > > I'm trying to sort the reasonable from the unreasonable here and to identify > genuine problems before they occur. The point is - less uniforms, more > distinct textures render faster. Any rendering load can even be optional. > What can not be optional is the size of your base package once I start > adding textures to it. So it's a question of pain because a scene looks bad > vs. pain because of large download vs. pain because of high performance > needs.
I see applications that care for stable 60 hz. If you get for one frame 59 hz they have too much jitter and look for an other renderer. What I really do not like is that people purely push in the direction they just like more. If you work sensibly, you can support both. If you want photorealistic pictures use a raytracer or do global illumination and use a cluster to do the pictures. But this is a *training* *flight* *simulation*. And as this having nice pictures is great to have, but if this is at cost realtime frame rates this is not acceptable at all. This is especially bad since it is possible to support both. It's just that enough loud people are after more glossy pictures and do not care for the initial purpose. At least this is my impression. Do not get me wrong. Especially the defered renderer is a huge step into a good direction. And this accounts for a lot of gloss and currently still for a lot of slowdown if being used. Not to talk about that implementation not running at well on some of my machines, but still, this is optional and really great to look at when it's working. And no, attacking the big base package by procedural textures exclusively is something that gets my clear NACK. If done sensibly, you can do a lot with shaders, and this even can look way better than a texture. This can be even faster than with textures. If you work sensibly and also care for performance I am all for this *as* *an* *alternative*. I personally live behind a very slow 1gbit DSL connect. So, I must be the one that is whining about the download size. But why am I able to manage this? If you want to have a smaller download, you can for example walk all textures that are in the base package and in the scenery, look if there are rgba textures with a constant equal to zero alpha channel. Then for textures with a needless alpha chanel, replace these with rgb textures. That would be a simple and effective candidate for improovement. That would help osg for unneeded transparancy sorting and that would help the gpu. Sure the git commit object will stay. But people wante to have a distributed revison control system. It was clear that these objects stay then. > > And please finally teach your mailer not to drop the reply reference! > > ... if you write just one less of these lenghty mails you should be able > > to find that knob. > > This goes via a webmail interface that is managed by my University's beloved > IT department - please don't ask me any more, or I would tell a few really > good stories... Suffice to say, it doesn't seem possible to do. In the > overall scheme of things, this is a minor annoyance... You could use an other mail for example. And to me this is *really* annoying. Mathias ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
