[Flightgear-devel] Project dynamics (was: Earthview - Orbital terrain rendering in FG)

2012-03-19 Thread Renk Thorsten
 You haven't really looked at any of my designs so far, have you?

 Nice trick - didn't work

Martin, 

I have no clue what the point of this is. I'm in the habit of trying to say 
what I think as clearly as possible, rather than trying to play tricks (I've 
been hanging around in international communities long enough to know that 
cross-culture tricks, hints, irony,... as a rule don't work).

Flightgear is OpenSource and based on volunteer effort, which means there is no 
way to tell a contributor to behave a certain way. This basic fact has 
consequences. We often don't know up front the one and only solution  to solve 
a problem, so it's not just coding the known solution, it's finding the 
approach which works best for the problem at hand. This fact has other 
consequences.

One of the consequences is that we need to self-organize - there is no 
supervisor which can tell us what to work on. Self-organization works pretty 
much as in what I do for a living (research): There is a problem you'd like to 
solve, but it's too much to do on your own. There are people who have some of 
the experience or resources needed to solve it. There are others who might get 
interested and their help might be beneficial. So you start talking, get the 
people with special expertise interested, you create a proof of concept, they 
start seeing something might come out of it, they get involved. When the 
approach is sound, you let the information spread, more people get involved 
from unexpected sides and the project is well on the way.

It's actually considered a good thing if an alternative approach is around - 
because then there's competition, you may figure out that a different way to do 
something is way faster, or has other advantages. You can later decide to 
abandon one approach, or to merge them and take best of two worlds, or to keep 
both.

There are some key factors involved here. First, others have to know what 
you're doing. You can't expect a project to attract people when you post a 
description on the wiki and then disappear to code for two years. No human 
attention span works that way.

Once people get involved, they have to see some return on their investment of 
their time a relatively short timescale. I'm guessing here, but I suspect part 
of why Stuart or Torsten have been consistently willing to add features to the 
core which I requested is that I could make a plausible case what these 
features will do beforehand and that there were results a few weeks later. I 
don't suppose I could expect much help if I would request something and then 
disappear for two years without any note.

Others have to see the evolving thing, so that they can decide better where to 
put their efforts (join the existing project, start a conpeting project, do 
something else). The better they judge your ongoing efforts, the less likely it 
becomes that they will start competition.

In my view, due to the need to self-organize, we can't have as clean and 
well-organized a project as any commercial enterprise can. There will always be 
dead ends, the need to go back and remove hacks upon hacks and so on. We can 
make this easier by writing modular design, but to try to avoid this takes away 
any advantage our system has, i.e. that it is flexible and can find new and 
unexpected solutions. There is no point in trying to adopt a commercial 
development strategy, because we really have none of their advantages, we just 
throw away ours. I had to rewrite a big chunk of Advanced Weather in the 
transition to Stuart's cloud rendering system. If we had planned this up-front 
properly, none of this would have been necessary. So much work wasted? But wait!

The flaw in this argument is that if we had planned this up front, we would 
have nothing because Stuart would have been entirely reasonable to conclude up 
front that spending a month to code some individual cloud placement and 
movement routines requested by a forum newcomer  proposing to write a complete 
integrated weather system is a waste of his time, because nothing will ever 
come out of it (forum users are remarkably quick to propose redesigned terrain 
engines and similar things). It needed a working imperfect solution to create 
the momentum for the project to take off, i.e. to convince others that their 
efforts are well spent here.

I believe you have seen more and more people directing their effort into custom 
scenery rather than official world scenery for precisely the same reasons 
turned around. Your conclusion from that seems to be that scenery people are 
just unusually egoistic. My conclusion is that scenery people are pretty normal 
and self-organize in a pretty normal way - just your assumption that timescales 
and information flow are secondary as long as the end result is proper is 
wrong. I realize I'm probably not going to convince you of anything here. 
Nevertheless, I believe thinking along these lines might save the odd 
disappointment.

Best 

Re: [Flightgear-devel] Earthview - Orbital terrain rendering in FG

2012-03-19 Thread Renk Thorsten

 You ought to be able to initialize any vehicle at any altitude (up to and
 even beyond 3000 km). At this time, only the Vostok has control jets, as  
 far as I know.

Actually I can not do that. Trying to initialize the ufo at 1.000.000 ft works 
fine, and so does flying the ufo to the altitude. I've then removed the 
altitude limit detection from the Vostok model leading to an automatic scenario 
termination. Trying to initialize Vostok at 1.000.000 ft causes Flightgear not 
to load properly (it gets stuck and some JSBSim messages never appear), trying 
to fly up beyond 150 km altitude causes a crash of FG shortly after reaching 
the red zone. So something is happening with a JSBSim model which isn't 
happening with the ufo FDM.

Cheers,

* Thorsten
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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Earthview - Orbital terrain rendering in FG

2012-03-19 Thread Monroe L. King Jr.
I'm a new guy and I have to chime in on this our team wants to use FG
for simulations to orbit because we are actually trying to be the first
amateurs to make orbit and we would like to do HIL testing. FG may be
our only hope. If there is something I can do to help please direct me. 

Monroe 
Team Prometheus

  Original Message 
 Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Earthview - Orbital terrain rendering
 in FG
 From: Renk Thorsten thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi
 Date: Mon, March 19, 2012 6:22 am
 To: FlightGear developers discussions
 flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
 
 
  You ought to be able to initialize any vehicle at any altitude (up to and
  even beyond 3000 km). At this time, only the Vostok has control jets, as  
  far as I know.
 
 Actually I can not do that. Trying to initialize the ufo at 1.000.000 ft 
 works fine, and so does flying the ufo to the altitude. I've then removed the 
 altitude limit detection from the Vostok model leading to an automatic 
 scenario termination. Trying to initialize Vostok at 1.000.000 ft causes 
 Flightgear not to load properly (it gets stuck and some JSBSim messages never 
 appear), trying to fly up beyond 150 km altitude causes a crash of FG shortly 
 after reaching the red zone. So something is happening with a JSBSim model 
 which isn't happening with the ufo FDM.
 
 Cheers,
 
 * Thorsten
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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Earthview - Orbital terrain rendering in FG

2012-03-19 Thread Ron Jensen
On Monday 19 March 2012 07:22:52 Renk Thorsten wrote:
  You ought to be able to initialize any vehicle at any altitude (up to and
  even beyond 3000 km). At this time, only the Vostok has control jets, as
  far as I know.

 Actually I can not do that. Trying to initialize the ufo at 1.000.000 ft
 works fine, and so does flying the ufo to the altitude. I've then removed
 the altitude limit detection from the Vostok model leading to an automatic
 scenario termination. Trying to initialize Vostok at 1.000.000 ft causes
 Flightgear not to load properly (it gets stuck and some JSBSim messages
 never appear), trying to fly up beyond 150 km altitude causes a crash of FG
 shortly after reaching the red zone. So something is happening with a
 JSBSim model which isn't happening with the ufo FDM.

 Cheers,

 * Thorsten

I assume you ran into a bunch of PT_vs_hpt: ran out of layers for h= messages. 
This is from FlightGear's rather brittle atmosphere model. The attached patch 
adds a deep-space layer out to 1e9 meters. I just arbitrarily set the 
pressure to near 0 and the temperature to damn cold. This patch let me 
initialize a random JSBSim model at a million feet, however there were still 
some NaNs present in the property tree when I made it back to sea-level.

Ron

I sent this half an hour ago, and sourceforge ate it. I'll send it again to 
see if this one comes through in a timely fashion...
diff --git a/src/Environment/atmosphere.cxx b/src/Environment/atmosphere.cxx
index 022ea54..f16005f 100644
--- a/src/Environment/atmosphere.cxx
+++ b/src/Environment/atmosphere.cxx
@@ -18,7 +18,8 @@ ISA_layer(3,  32000,  104986,  868.019,0.256326, 228.65, -44.50, -0.0028,  -
 ISA_layer(4,  47000,  154199,  110.906,   0.0327506, 270.65,  -2.50,   0,   0),
 ISA_layer(5,  51000,  167322,  66.9389,   0.0197670, 270.65,  -2.50,  0.0028,   0.0008534),
 ISA_layer(6,  71000,  232939,  3.95642,  0.00116833, 214.65, -58.50,  0.0020,   0.0006096),
-ISA_layer(7,  8,  262467,  0.88628, 0.000261718, 196.65, -76.50),
+ISA_layer(7,  8,  262467,  0.88628, 0.000261718, 196.65, -76.50,  0.0,  0.0),
+ISA_layer(8,  1.0e9,  3.28e9,  0.1, 3.0e-9,2.73, -270.4,  0.0,  0.0),
 };
 
 const int ISA_def_size(sizeof(ISA_def) / sizeof(ISA_layer));

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