Hi Chris, I've just reviewed the MODIFYTERRAIN plugin and understand the motivation and in reading the code and reflecting on the general direction I can't help feel that it's a very specific solution to a specific problem, rather than a generally usable tool. The existing psuedo plugins suffer from this as well, but at least they can be used from more than just just modifying the height values of osgTerrain databases.
My gut instinct is avoid "configurable" solutions like this, and go for "programmable" ones in instead, much like fixed function pipeline has been replaced by shaders down on the GPU, we should also take this approach for tools like this. The real problem with configurable solutions is that they only solve a specific problem, as soon as you want to solve even a slightly different problem you have to write a completely new pathway. In the case of OSG plugins it'll mean opening to door to have to write and manage a whole range of pseudo plugins. With Jeremy Moles proposing use of Lua in osgWidget to provide flexible control of event handling/callbacks perhaps we could take the same approach here. Would it be possible to expose a set of interfaces in Lua and then run a lua script to do the elevation modification. Once would then provide the a lua script pseudo plugin and a lua script to modify the terrain/do what you want. Such an approach would also be re-usable beyond psuedo plugins - you could invoke the script directly in your app. Thoughts? Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-submissions mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-submissions-openscenegraph.org
