Thorsten Renk > -----Original Message----- > From: [mailto:thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi] > Sent: 14 February 2013 07:25 > To: FlightGear developers discussions > Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Autumn colors > > > ..maybe in the old days, nowadays, some grass is green, most of it, > > say 4/5 is a pale dull yellow when the snow comes. > > Climate change, grass grows about 3 months longer now, than in the > > 1960-ies when grass was cut once, nowadays farmers get > > 3 harvests. > > The whole discussion brings again a long standing issue to my mind. > > It's a slider. It's in fact part of a menu of several environent-controlling > sliders. Which means that you (the user) is supposed to adjust it. > > Now, my philosophy is - what you get as a user here is a tool which gives you > infinite options how precisely your terrain may look like. You can have a dry > autumn, a wet autumn, just a bit of snow on dry autumn - all by adjusting the > sliders. > > The price you have to pay is that you actually have to think a bit, because the > system allows you to select silly and unnatural combinations. You can have > snow in Hawaii, you can have desert dust in rainforest, you can combine dust > and season to kill vegetation off completely in central Europe. > > >From where I stand, having infinite possibilities seems more interesting > than just having 4 pre-defined season textures. But having 4 pre-defined > scenarios is on the other hand fool-proof - you will not be able to select a silly > combination. But we may disagree on that. > > My goal is to be able to simulate a realistic seasonal change of the terrain by > _suitable_ slider adjustments which need to be chosen based on region, > vegetation and conditions. My goal is not to make any combination of slider > adjustments work everywhere. > > > But if there is otherwise general consensus that we should operate FG in > such a mode as to prevent unrealistic user input, just let me know, and I > remove the environment postprocessing from GIT and keep it in my own > devel branch. I am decidedly not keen on feedback along the lines 'Oh, look, > if I adjust the sliders like that, it really looks bad!' > > So if climate change affects your region and you believe that vegetation > doesn't get all brown, then just do not move the slider all the way. It's as > simple as that, and I really shouldn't need to write that here. >
I fell into the pooh trap - I read your instructions, looked at the slider, set late autumn, and Kent turned an impossible shade of brown. Now that you have explained it, I see that if the slider is set to early autumn that this gives me much more reasonable results for a southern UK late autumn. What I expected was that having selected Regional scenery, then the slider would give me reasonable results for my region. Perhaps that's simply too difficult, or the region is defined too widely. I also see that the regional scenery for the area is wrong as well, but I'm working on that. Right now there are a number of inconsistent approaches. We can select pre-set Summer/Winter, but not Autumn. We can select snow by METAR, but not in Winter, however, the slider works even when METAR is selected. We can set various parameters by slider for the scenery, which the GUI says requires shader effects, but apart from the snow thickness, in fact all require Atmospheric Light Scattering, which is in a different menu and this connection is not mentioned. In addition one slider only works with Regional scenery, and that's not mentioned anywhere either. Wetness effects the scenery, but not runways, while moss seems to grow on taxiways and runways. It it's raining, there's a nice effect of puddles on runways and taxiways, but nowhere else. I'm not at all sure that I've got that all right, and I can't imagine how the average user is going to figure it out. I suspect that the user will try it, might or might not discover how it works, and never try it again. It's just too complex to get the average head around. Even just trying to summarise it makes mine ache! Finally, I write this in the hope it might be helpful, and not be taken as negative criticism. Vivian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
