> Are the Winter textures still needed? In a sense they were never really needed... for instance I have never used them.
Just to summarize the options we have to generate snow: 1) Winter textures They are base texture sheets with snow painted on, which means they have a fixed snowcover and no simulation of a snowline is possible. On the good side, they do not need any shader technology and render with some margin fastest of all snow options. 2) Snow texture overlay This uses shader technology to overlay a snow texture on the terrain, and is the snow feature implemented in the default rendering scheme (I don't know about Rembrandt, maybe also there?). This has a fixed snow coverage but variable snowline and uses significantly more resources than 1) (needs to read a second texture, needs to read noise textures, needs to compute the local amount of snow based on terrain gradient). 3) Procedural snow This is a white base color modified by several noise functions. It has variable snow coverage, i.e. can change from thin patches of snow to a thick layer, and has a variable snowline. It is implemented in Atmospheric Light Scattering at the higher quality levels. This needs about as much performance as 2) and much more than 1) (evaluates terrain gradient and several noise functions, but doesn't read any texture). If we want to have a CD-sized base package, and if we're fine with not supporting snow on less powerful hardware, then we can remove the snow textures. If we want to support snow on weak hardware, then they are needed. A (more complicated) option would be to offer only one set of terrain textures in the base package and offer the others as additional downloads. Both the dds and the winter textures are probably relatively clean to separate - as far as I know they're not shared across different schemes. My private opinion is that aiming for CD-size isn't that important and I would leave everything in. * 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_d2d_jan _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
