I want to bring a potential issue of the cloud detail range system to everyone's attention.
What it does it reducing sprite count by dropping sprites in the back half of the cloud if the cloud is more than a configurable distance away, so faraway clouds have less overall density. This works great for Cu-type clouds which are generated from 20-30 relatively opaque sprites - faraway Cu clouds still look decent with half, and in 50 km distance would work well with a single sprite, as this is still very opaque. The problem are faint Cirrus-type clouds which use 2-3 sprites, or in extreme cases just a single one (they have a transparency of more than 90% and are really just a faint haze modulation). Here, dropping half of the sprites essentially mutilates the appearance of the cloud. I have just comitted some very nice undulatus pattern distributions, and dropping half (actually in practice about 2/3 of the sprites seem to go...) just changes the appearance of the sky drastically. I am unsure of what to do about it. The detail range works as advertized, and is clearly useful for reasonable performance, but currently the user is unaware that he's even in light cloud cover not seeing Cirrus patterns which should be there. So it's mainly an awareness issue, setting the cloud detail range to a large value makes everything re-appear. I think ideally a way to drop sprites only for certain types of clouds and protect the faint ones would be desirable. Do we for instance have an unused attribute slot where the number of sprites used to generate the cloud can be passed? * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
