I have noticed that while flying formation in flightgear multiplayer that when I get very close to the other aircraft in formation that they start to disappear. Today I managed to capture a screen shot of what this looks like. So I though I would open a thread about this here to see what the developers or others think might be going on.
I posted the screen shot of this in the photo gallery of the Flightgear Fan Portal. To see the screen shot go to: http://flightgearfan.6x.to/ Select "Zoom Media Gallery" then select "FlightGear Gallery" then select 10 at the buttom of the page. The image that shows the issue is labeled "Close formation - PC-7 aircraft". If you look closely at the PC-7 which is partly obscured by the windshield bow you will notice that it does not have a tail and it looks like the tail was cut off by a knife. You will also see the nvidia horizon problem in the image. You can use the magnifier to get a better look at the part of the image that shows the problem. Interestingly I could not see the horizon issue when I took the screen shot. There is another image in this gallery taken at a slightly farther distance from the PC-7 that shows an intact PC-7 in formation. I am not sure if the invisible tail is a flightgear problem, a problem with the PC-7 model or if it is related to OpenGL or the nvidia drivers. What I am seeing is that as I get closer to the aircraft ahead of me it's tail starts to disappear and as I get even closer more of it will disappear until it is totally gone. At one point I actually got in a position where all I could see was the propeller and spinner which was kind of interesting since I was behind the other aircraft. I would estimate that my apparent distance from the closest part of the other PC-7 when this screen shot was taken to be 50 to 75 feet. Since the view is at a very wide angle things are much closer than they appear. I tried some tests with objects on the ground such as the hanger and the two static aircraft (IE. the 747 that sits on the ground at KSFO) and these did not show the issue. Then I tried the C172 that is always located just off the end of 28L (mpdummy) and it also did not show any signs of this issue. For those interested these screen shots are of my whole display which consists of two 19 inch 1600x1200 CRTs. X11 is configured for xinerama and I am running flightgear in game mode with the resolution set to 3200x1200. This is a 120 degree horizontal field of view. The vertical field of view is about 45 degrees. This is version 0.9.11-pre1 and it is running on an amd64 Linux system. The video drivers are version 100.14.11. The PC-7 is from CVS about 3 weeks ago. Hal ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
