Emilian, just up-front to keep this discussion focused on what it actually is about:
Do you, or do you not agree that 20 (or 16) km terrain loaded regardless of the visibility is a sane value? Somehow, you still haven't really answered the question, you're just expressing unspecified 'concerns' and attacking Advanced Weather. > Let's say I'm an average user with a 32bit system, I can barely find my > way through the maze of menus and dialogs flightgear presents to me, and I > want to use this more advanced weather simulation engine. After I > accidentaly > find out how to enable it (it's hidden under a rather confusing radio-button > > selection "Model overall weather conditions based on metar"), great, select > "Fair > weather" scneario, Apply, OK, let's go flying. At this point you've already made a decision that you do not want to run the default weather engine but this 'more advanced engine'. Some folks might say that you could guess that it also needs more resources. As for the 'rather confusing radio button selection', there was a discussion here initiated by Stuart (who did this version of the weather GUI) how to do this properly. Presenting the user a single GUI which blurs the difference between Advanced Weather and Basic Weather has considered a design goal. Don't you think it would have been more useful then to express your concerns? The way the GUI works is not my idea, but it's based on a decision following a discussion in which I had my say, so I back it now. > improved somewhat, then bam after 15 minutes flightgear crashes, uhm.. > oohh, > why did that happen? That didn't happen before? No, that's in fact not what happens. What actually happens is that as visibility expands, you're going to realize that the terrain edges become visible because the visibility is greater than the terrain LOD setting. It so happens that we have precisely the question answered by Bjoern describing running Advanced Weather on an old 2 GB machine. http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=19201#p177724 So rather than a crash, you get the end of terrain, which isn't optimal but might prompt you to investigate either the weather options or the LOD settings (I think we should be able to handle that better, but that's a different story). I also think max. visibility set by default to 120 km is a mistake - it must have slipped in, the value I had forseen is 35 km and I will correct this). > You look at view-distance/fog just as an atmospheric phenomenon, that you > think should be represented verbatim, well it's not. It's not just that > in any > case, and if for it to fulfil all its roles you need to abdicate from the > verbatim aproach, well then I'm sorry but my opinion is that you should. It's _optional_ for god's sake. Which means you don't have to use it if you don't like the approach, end of story. Some folks (like me) do think it matters, so they check the option. > If there's a docummented option (key shortcut, command-line switch, > property setting) about setting that, is it so hard to obey it? Yes. Because which is the visibility you want to affect? Ground visibility? The visibility in the rain patch ahead of you? The visibility at your altitude? Visibility is re-computed every frame, that's why you can't adjust it to a single value. > I have nothing about the core of the Advanced weather engine, I have an > issue > of how you interact with it, and how it interacts with other parts of the > whole system... and in my view this is broken. > > I also have nothing against the idea of the atmospheric scattering, I > have an > issue with how it's done, which is suboptimal in my view... and again of > how you can interact with it/ how it affects other systems, and how it's > affected by > other systems. This is called development. We used to have a system in which visibility is a single value, and for that setup all you need to do is set the value. Now we have an (optional) new and more sophisticated system in which light is different at every point in the scene and in which visibility is a complicated beast changing for every point of the scene. (This is also a discussion which we had on the list...) How on earth do you expect it to interact with a previously existing system which was never designed to handle that new concept of visibility or light? Regardless of how well that old system was designed and documented, it can not deliver all the information which the new system needs. Advanced Weather as well as Atmospheric Light Scattering have genuine new requirements as to what input they need. You can't expect that they interface seamlessly with systems like Basic Weather or a visibility changing key which were never designed to have that kind of information about the environment. If you want weather which interacts with the terrain, you have to have the terrain in memory by the time you build the weather. It's not 'just because I can', it's not mean-spirited, it's just a necessary ingredient. If I want to light mountaintops and high clouds properly, I need a light penetration model of the atmosphere. It's not mean spirited or 'just because I can', it's a necessary ingredient. If you expect that all new developments play along with what we had in FG 0.9.1, you're severely restricted in what you can do. Speaking of interactions between systems - Emilian, you never lifted a finger to make the water shader work with Advanced Weather, nor did you offer any help - that was somehow my job to fix because I am the weather maintainer. Now you complain that not everything in Atmospheric Light Scattering works with Basic Weather and that it would be my job to fix because I am the shader creator? Doesn't sound fair to me... Speaking of 'interacting with other systems' - Rembrandt requires in many cases changes to aircraft and models and doesn't 'play along' with what we previously had - but somehow that seems to be okay because... it hasn't been done by me? Because you happen to like it better? > These are not just isolated litle bits that can do all they want without > affecting anything, they're integrated into a bigger picture, and a small > seemingly insignificant change can bring down the whole system, why? Just > because someone saw that it's possible to set view distance to 1000 km, Who set the view distance to 1000 km? I don't remember that argument. > And all this is solvable just by adding a crappy line of text as a > warning in a dialog, and making a slider take the global setting. Well, why didn't you see fit to contribute to the weather GUI merge dialog if it is such a major issue? (note that it's actually a non issue, because we know for a fact that the 'FG crashes without apparent reason' scenario doesn't actually happen...) > Since advanced weather seems to have a slider for maximum visibility, > why not change the key binding to make z/Z control this maximum visibility? > This > still leaves control of visibility with advanced weather but should satisfy > the > people using this key for memory management (however wrong that approach > may be in my opinion) I'm not in favour of having any key control visibility and my preferred solution would be to remove the key binding altogether, but in case we decide to keep it, I am fine with this solution (I don't know how key bindings are done though...) * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. 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