Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-02-11 Thread Torsten Dreyer
Am 22.01.2012 21:27, schrieb Stuart Buchanan:
 On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 And I just pushed that to FGDATA. Global Weather and Local Weather
 is dead. Long live Basic Weather and Advanced Weather :-)

 Thanks Torsten. That looks great.

 BTW, if this change is merged into the 2.6.0 branch, we should also include
 commit a38820828c5343dbcb77d97a65597d736c845ff4, which removes
 a now-redundant reference to the local_weather_tiles menu item.

 I've also made the co-requisite change to The Manual
 (773db8825336521c42fd4d0edb22ca2d1bcc06ea) that should also
 be merged.

I have just cherry-picked the Basic/Advanced Weather patches into 
release/2.6.0 - including Stuarts change to local_weather.nas.

We don't have release branches for the getstart repository (The Manual), 
so there is nothing to merge/pick there.

Torsten

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[Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure: Wind settings

2012-01-30 Thread D-NXKT
Hello,

I just faild to set the wind speed and direction in the new weather menue 
structure (up to date next-branch). My intention was to set the wind profile 
from ground up to 3000ft.  
Hence I used the Basic Weather menue and set the desired values in the table.
But I found that I got the wind speed and direction from the Advanced Weather 
Menue instead. Is this a bug/feature or am I simply to stupid to set the 
values correctly?

BTW: 
I'm totally impressed by the capabilities of the weather system, especially 
for glider pilots. I must admit that the weather system is a big motivation 
for me to keep up the development of a hangglider for FlightGear. Up to now 
the results are very promising. Soaring feels very realistic!

Best regards
D-NXKT

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure: Wind settings

2012-01-30 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 I just faild to set the wind speed and direction in the new weather menue
 structure (up to date next-branch). My intention was to set the wind
 profile
 from ground up to 3000ft.
 Hence I used the Basic Weather menue and set the desired values in the
 table.
 But I found that I got the wind speed and direction from the Advanced
 Weather
 Menue instead. Is this a bug/feature or am I simply to stupid to set the
 values correctly?

Not sure what exactly you were trying to do. When you run Advanced
Weather, it always uses its own wind model - it can't know what you
entered in the Basic Weather config dialog and it doesn't care - we're not
so far along the road to a merged weather system (if you were running
Basic weather and it was ignoring its own config, that'd be a bug though).

Advanced Weather has a few wind modes - constant (wind is the same
everywhere), constant in tile (wind is the same in each chunk of 40x40 km,
but may change between tiles), aloft interpolated (wind is interpolated
based on the values entered in the wind dialog which is visible when you
press 'show winds' and aloft waypoints (wind is interpolated based on a
set of vectors both in altitude and in position - this is *very*
cumbersome to enter manually and intended to run with online weather).

Even the aloft interpolated modes don't allow you to select an arbitrary
wind profile though, the low altitude interpolation altitude values are
always 0, 5000 ft and 1 ft (this choice made following advice from
TorstenD who had plans to get online aloft winds automatically in this
format, something which isn't implemented yet), so you can only have a
linear profile between these altitudes.

The system doesn't allow you to specify wind conditions in the boundary
layer, because it wants to compute them itself. You get a boundary layer
which adapts to terrain roughness and local elevation, for instance there
is no boundary layer slowdown of winds at mountaintops, and significantly
less on upper mountain slopes than on the ground (which is somewhat
important for ridge lift to work properly), boundary layer slowdown is far
less pronounced over open water than in mountain terrain,... I suspect you
were interested in specifying especially this region? In case you  want to
do something to the boundary layer computation, you'd have to dig into the
code, this can't be done from config.



Hope that helps.

 BTW:
 I'm totally impressed by the capabilities of the weather system,
 especially
 for glider pilots. I must admit that the weather system is a big
 motivation
 for me to keep up the development of a hangglider for FlightGear. Up to
 now the results are very promising. Soaring feels very realistic!

Thanks.

There's a lot of real life glider flying experience behind the convective
cloud system and the thermals :-) If I find the time (which doesn't happen
too often) I enjoy going cross-country with the ASK-13 very much. Like in
real life, there are all sorts of surprises which can happen, and I always
find mountain-soaring very exciting. Still need to implement that wave
lift model at some point...

Cheers,

* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-24 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 The change is releatively small but I'd feel better if ThorstenR tested
 it before it gets picked.

The menu structure works like a charm - I think the switching button is a
very elegant solution. I did a couple of tests yesterday, and I didn't run
into any problems here.

I've also had a look at the impostor code. I tried a benchmark situation
with some thin, detailed (= many cloudlets) and hence framerate-expensive
layers to gauge the effect. It didn't really even work to set up the
benchmark properly.

* in sunrise/sunset conditions, I could see the impostors. They don't
inherit the lighting from the shader, so they were showing up with the
wrong colors which didn't look very natural, but at least there was
something visible

* in noon conditions, I couldn't even really see the impostors, as they
were so faint and the sudden change in layer properties from visible to
faint clouds was rather drastic

* using the basic weather clouds, the differences where not quite as
drastic and I could see the impostors, but I could still see quite well
where the impostors started

* under no conditions was I able to detect any significant framerate gain
- just maybe something like 32 fps vs 30 fps, but that may have been
driven by other factors - I think that agrees pretty well with Stuart's
findings.

So, I think that's functionality which is better left optional - it
doesn't seem to do an equally good job for all cloud types, and the
framerate gain doesn't seem to be there for everyone.

Cheers,

* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-23 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 I am hesitating from picking this into the release branch as one could
 argue if that was a bug fix. But if it's general consensus  that this a
 an improvement that should make it into the release, we should do it.
 The change is releatively small but I'd feel better if ThorstenR tested
 it before it gets picked.

Since the sunrise work is finished, I will catch up with master today and
test a few things (I rather suspect that the water shader/environment
interface may be rendered non-functional by some recent developments...).

I'll also give the impostors a good try.

 BTW, if this change is merged into the 2.6.0 branch, we should also include
 commit a38820828c5343dbcb77d97a65597d736c845ff4, which removes
 a now-redundant reference to the local_weather_tiles menu item.

I'm hoping this is local_weather_config.xml... local_weather_tiles.xml is
actually the relevant menu :-) If nobody sees any issues, I would argue
for deleting the menu itm also in the release branch, because a
non-functioning menu can be considered a bug in my book.

I also plan to make a list of by now obsolete files and textures. I'm too
late for the release (I had this in mind a while ago, but the 6 weeks
without computer really threw my schedule off the track), but I think it's
useful to do some housekeeping.


* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-23 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 8:08 AM, Thorsten Renk wrote:
 Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 BTW, if this change is merged into the 2.6.0 branch, we should also include
 commit a38820828c5343dbcb77d97a65597d736c845ff4, which removes
 a now-redundant reference to the local_weather_tiles menu item.

 I'm hoping this is local_weather_config.xml... local_weather_tiles.xml is
 actually the relevant menu :-)

local_weather_tiles.xml is the dialog, which remains, and is referenced from the
new Weather menu item.

There used to be a menu item called local_weather_tiles (which also
referred to the
local_weather_tiles.xml dialog), which is no-longer used and was being
enabled/disabled.

The menu item local_weather_config has also been removed.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-22 Thread Torsten Dreyer
 So, let's add a Advanced-- button to the global weather dialog which
 closes the global-weather dialog, enabled local weather and opens the
 local weather dialog. In return, the local-weather dialog gets a
 Basic-- button which disables local weather, closes the
 local-weather-dialog and opens the global-weather-dialog.

 This sounds very convincing to me - I'm in favour of this solution. And
 we'd like to go that road further anyway :-)

And I just pushed that to FGDATA. Global Weather and Local Weather 
is dead. Long live Basic Weather and Advanced Weather :-)

Torsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-22 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 And I just pushed that to FGDATA. Global Weather and Local Weather
 is dead. Long live Basic Weather and Advanced Weather :-)

Thanks Torsten. That looks great.

BTW, if this change is merged into the 2.6.0 branch, we should also include
commit a38820828c5343dbcb77d97a65597d736c845ff4, which removes
a now-redundant reference to the local_weather_tiles menu item.

I've also made the co-requisite change to The Manual
(773db8825336521c42fd4d0edb22ca2d1bcc06ea) that should also
be merged.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-22 Thread Torsten Dreyer
Am 22.01.2012 21:27, schrieb Stuart Buchanan:
 On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Torsten Dreyer wrote:
 And I just pushed that to FGDATA. Global Weather and Local Weather
 is dead. Long live Basic Weather and Advanced Weather :-)

 Thanks Torsten. That looks great.

 BTW, if this change is merged into the 2.6.0 branch, we should also include
 commit a38820828c5343dbcb77d97a65597d736c845ff4, which removes
 a now-redundant reference to the local_weather_tiles menu item.

 I've also made the co-requisite change to The Manual
 (773db8825336521c42fd4d0edb22ca2d1bcc06ea) that should also
 be merged.

Ah - thanks. I wasn't aware of that line of code. We should make sure, 
ThorstenR has backported that into his codebase when commiting a new 
version from him.

I am hesitating from picking this into the release branch as one could 
argue if that was a bug fix. But if it's general consensus  that this a 
an improvement that should make it into the release, we should do it. 
The change is releatively small but I'd feel better if ThorstenR tested 
it before it gets picked.

Torsten

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-21 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 Just an idea: as global and local weather are mutually exclusive, what
 about having just one single weather menu item and add button in each,
 global and local weather dialog causing the current dialog disappear and
 open the other dialog.
 While we are at it, I'd like to rename global and local weather to basic
 and advanced weather.

 So, let's add a Advanced-- button to the global weather dialog which
 closes the global-weather dialog, enabled local weather and opens the
 local weather dialog. In return, the local-weather dialog gets a
 Basic-- button which disables local weather, closes the
 local-weather-dialog and opens the global-weather-dialog.

This sounds very convincing to me - I'm in favour of this solution. And
we'd like to go that road further anyway :-)

* Thorsten


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[Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-20 Thread thorsten . i . renk

My GIT is now a week old, but in all likelihood this hasn't changed and is
in the release branch:

In reaction to concerns about a confusing menu structure, I moved all
relevant configurations to

/gui/dialogs/local_weather_tiles.xml

(insofar as they are not controlled by the rendering dialog, which now
affects e.g. cloud visibility range).

This means that the second dialog

/gui/dialogs/local_weather_config.xml

contains only obsolete options - with one important exception, which is
the checkbox determining if the Local Weather Nasal module is loaded.

This cannot simply be moved to the other menu, because it also
de-activates the 'Local Weather' menu item, so if it is deactivated, the
only option (short of the property browser) to activate the menu would be
on the deactivated dialog.

I don't know what the solution should be, but I don't think the current
state of offering a configuration dialog which doesn't affect anything is
very good for a release. On the other hand, it should be clearly
recognizable that the Nasal module has to be loaded before the system
becomes functional.

If anyone of those who originally suggested that the config menu is
removed could please take care of this?

* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 9:59 AM, Thorsten Renk wrote:

 My GIT is now a week old, but in all likelihood this hasn't changed and is
 in the release branch:

 In reaction to concerns about a confusing menu structure, I moved all
 relevant configurations to

 /gui/dialogs/local_weather_tiles.xml

 (insofar as they are not controlled by the rendering dialog, which now
 affects e.g. cloud visibility range).

 This means that the second dialog

 /gui/dialogs/local_weather_config.xml

 contains only obsolete options - with one important exception, which is
 the checkbox determining if the Local Weather Nasal module is loaded.

 This cannot simply be moved to the other menu, because it also
 de-activates the 'Local Weather' menu item, so if it is deactivated, the
 only option (short of the property browser) to activate the menu would be
 on the deactivated dialog.

 I don't know what the solution should be, but I don't think the current
 state of offering a configuration dialog which doesn't affect anything is
 very good for a release. On the other hand, it should be clearly
 recognizable that the Nasal module has to be loaded before the system
 becomes functional.

 If anyone of those who originally suggested that the config menu is
 removed could please take care of this?

It's not clear from your mail whether the local_weather_config dialog in the
release branch can be removed once this checkbox issues is resolved.
Can you confirm?

Also, I noticed that there's another local_weather.xml dialog under gui/dialogs
that appears to be obsolete. Can you confirm that it can be deleted?

I'd suggest moving the /nasal/local_weather/enabled checkbox to the top of
the tiles dialog, and disabling the rest of the dialog when this is not set.
That way the dialog can be available at all times, while users will not be able
to set any local weather config without enabling it. Does that sound like a good
solution to you?

I'm happy to take a look at making this change later today.
It should be very straightforward.

I don't know whether this change should be in the release or not. It's
pretty late in the day.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-20 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 Also, I noticed that there's another local_weather.xml dialog under 
 gui/dialogs
 that appears to be obsolete. Can you confirm that it can be deleted?

Scratch that - I've just noticed this is used in the Debug menu.

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-20 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 It's not clear from your mail whether the local_weather_config dialog in
 the
 release branch can be removed once this checkbox issues is resolved.
 Can you confirm?

I haven't actually tried if removing it causes an error somewhere, but
it's not needed any more - all functions are either shifted to the other
menu or don't affect anything any more. So my recommendation is indeed to
remove it.

 I'd suggest moving the /nasal/local_weather/enabled checkbox to the top
 of
 the tiles dialog, and disabling the rest of the dialog when this is not
 set.
 That way the dialog can be available at all times, while users will not
 be able
 to set any local weather config without enabling it. Does that sound
 like a good
 solution to you?

Would work fine, except that for me a checkbox to (de-)activate a dialog
that way always caused errors (I tried at some point it to block
inconsistent options on the GUI level, and I always ended up with garbage)
- maybe I did it wrongly though.



Cheers,

* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local Weather menu structure

2012-01-20 Thread Torsten Dreyer
 I don't know what the solution should be, but I don't think the current
 state of offering a configuration dialog which doesn't affect anything is
 very good for a release. On the other hand, it should be clearly
 recognizable that the Nasal module has to be loaded before the system
 becomes functional.

 If anyone of those who originally suggested that the config menu is
 removed could please take care of this?

Just an idea: as global and local weather are mutually exclusive, what 
about having just one single weather menu item and add button in each, 
global and local weather dialog causing the current dialog disappear and 
open the other dialog.
While we are at it, I'd like to rename global and local weather to basic 
and advanced weather.

So, let's add a Advanced-- button to the global weather dialog which 
closes the global-weather dialog, enabled local weather and opens the 
local weather dialog. In return, the local-weather dialog gets a 
Basic-- button which disables local weather, closes the 
local-weather-dialog and opens the global-weather-dialog.

Our first simple step into a unified weather ;-)

Torsten

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[Flightgear-devel] Local weather: menu structure

2011-03-25 Thread thorsten . i . renk
 The local weather menu option is first before the other local weather
 options.  This does open up a dialog box where you do have to create
 clouds
 1-by-1.  Looking at this, it appears that the intent of this is more for
 debugging.  Maybe it would make sense to move this option over to the
 debugging menu if that is the case?

That's actually a good point and I was about to ask a similar thing for
the release version.

The main use of the 'Local Weather' menu item is development. I use it
when I introduce a new texture to test which cloud spacing, which degree
of randomness and such things a layer composed of these clouds needs to
look natural - once I have the parameters, I code a Nasal call to the same
effect. It's also useful for benchmark tests because it allows to create a
well-defined configuration of clouds. Finally, at some point Patrice Poly
used it when he did some experiments with hires textures as an easy way to
test how the extracted textures look in the scenery.

It doesn't really have user applications or debug value. So my original
suggestion would have been to rename 'Local Weather Tiles' to 'Local
Weather' and to comment out the current 'Local Weather' in the
menubar.xml. The small number of people who may actually need it for
development can then simply edit menubar.xml and have it again, the rest
doesn't need to see it, because it is confusing.

However, if someone sees value in having it in the debug section or
somewhere else, then I suggest to move it.

In addition, I have the strong feeling a good and intuitive gui cannot be
designed by the developer of the underlying code. I've realized a few
times already that I know far too much about the inner workings of the
code to even think of trying some things, which others simply do. So if
anyone has too much time and wants to work on a better gui, please let me
know!

Cheers,

* Thorsten


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Local weather: menu structure

2011-03-25 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 7:44 AM,  Thorsten Renk wrote:
 The local weather menu option is first before the other local weather
 options.  This does open up a dialog box where you do have to create
 clouds
 1-by-1.  Looking at this, it appears that the intent of this is more for
 debugging.  Maybe it would make sense to move this option over to the
 debugging menu if that is the case?

 That's actually a good point and I was about to ask a similar thing for
 the release version.

 The main use of the 'Local Weather' menu item is development. I use it
 when I introduce a new texture to test which cloud spacing, which degree
 of randomness and such things a layer composed of these clouds needs to
 look natural - once I have the parameters, I code a Nasal call to the same
 effect. It's also useful for benchmark tests because it allows to create a
 well-defined configuration of clouds. Finally, at some point Patrice Poly
 used it when he did some experiments with hires textures as an easy way to
 test how the extracted textures look in the scenery.

 It doesn't really have user applications or debug value. So my original
 suggestion would have been to rename 'Local Weather Tiles' to 'Local
 Weather' and to comment out the current 'Local Weather' in the
 menubar.xml. The small number of people who may actually need it for
 development can then simply edit menubar.xml and have it again, the rest
 doesn't need to see it, because it is confusing.

 However, if someone sees value in having it in the debug section or
 somewhere else, then I suggest to move it.

I prefer the idea of renaming and moving, rather than commenting out
in the menubar.xml file.

I think there is value in retaining the dialog for those interested
in creating new cloud layers in the future, so having it in the Debug menu
makes sense (though perhaps Debug should be renamed Development).

The Debug menu is not used by most users, and is not documented in the
manual, so I don't see any problem in adding it there, even if it won't be used
regularly.

-Stuart

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