I've just pushed a few major modifications to the highest quality shaders of Atmospheric Light Scattering - the lower quality levels are at present unaltered. Please give some feedback so that I can decide what to do with the lower levels.
* I've converted fog and snow overlay from tile-coordinate 2D noise to world-coordinate 3D noise (I think FredB is to be credited for the concept). This has the big pro that the noise is continuous across terrain tile boundaries and looks much more appealing. The cons are that the computation load to generate a noise frequency doubles from 2D to 3D noise and that on my hardware, the world coordinates are numerically somewhat unstable. This means it works fine for large wavelength noise where accuracy isn't an issue (for me 250 m and larger is fine) but gives an inacceptable jitter for high frequency. Thus, all noise patterns below 250 m size scale are still created as before as 2D noise in tile coordinates. I don't know if the 250 m are save for everyone - Emilian at some point said he was fine down to 30 m using world coordinates which I definitely can't do. Please test and let me know if this is a problem on other GPUs and if the performance drain vs. visual gain is worth the procedure - if yes, I will implement 3D noise on lower quality level shaders as well. * The mentioned shadow code is also in for the high-quality terrain shader. In order to see the shadows deepen, you need to use fairly clear skies and Advanced Weather (unless Basic Weather starts communicating light attenuation, it will always use default shading). Fair weather is usually fine, and morning as time of day works well. I have not yet pushed modified trees, so best don't look at tree-covered slopes. The difference in shade can directly be seen by toggling between highest quality (landmass and transition both to max) and any lower quality. Please let me know if you pick up grossly unrealistic situations, if not I will make this the default behaviour. * Water in addition got a variable density drift ice overlay texture to use in winter and some 3D noise based water color and reflectivity modifications - I think it looks much nicer than monochrome water - again, any feedback appreciated. I have a half-baked scheme to make water color also dependent on proximity to the coast (this could get a ride on the terrain sampler which Advanced Weather is running anyway), but that's not there yet. * 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
