Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi Adrian,

On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:32 AM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
 I am presenting an experimental (WIP) method to reduce memory consumption by
 scenery with 30%, while increasing the visibility distance 4 times.
 This method relies on some kind of LOD system, without mesh simplification.
 People smarter than me can come up with a safe algorithm to do that, but I'm
 afraid it requires changes to Terragear. Right now mesh simplification was not

Could you explain how your system works?

Presumably you are making some change to the tiles for the low
resolution version?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 12:35:20 Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 Hi Adrian,
 
 On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:32 AM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
  I am presenting an experimental (WIP) method to reduce memory consumption
  by scenery with 30%, while increasing the visibility distance 4 times.
  This method relies on some kind of LOD system, without mesh
  simplification. People smarter than me can come up with a safe algorithm
  to do that, but I'm afraid it requires changes to Terragear. Right now
  mesh simplification was not
 
 Could you explain how your system works?
 
 Presumably you are making some change to the tiles for the low
 resolution version?
 
 -Stuart

Hi Stuart,
It' basically very simple. Far tiles no longer compute anything other than 
it's own geometry, and also use a very low resolution texture set, obtained by 
running a batch resize on the regular texture set.
This allows me to have 2.5 times larger view distance in high detail (SRTM) 
terrain with same memory consumption. There is of course a slight increase in 
disk IO, but I have only tested this with multithreading enabled on a dual 
core CPU. 
Load times for far tiles are actually smaller, since no calculations other 
than geometry and effects are performed on them.
Inner tiles close to the viewer position are normal tiles, nothing changed.
That's basically it.
I need to refactor the code a bit before I can show it, I wrote it fast and 
while half asleep.

Now, the really big stuff would be load-time mesh simplification, and I have 
read a couple of papers that seem to suggest that's possibile, but would 
require some changes to the BTG format. I leave that up to the Terragear guys, 
I am not very familiar with the way their mesh construction works.

Cheers,
Adrian


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Mathias Fröhlich

Hi Adrian,

The same idea is behind the osg lod based whole world model.
Where do you store the elevation data?

Greetings

Mathias


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Curtis Olson
There are many issues and tradeoffs with mesh simplification.  There are
many algorithms and approaches, each with their own unique strengths and
weaknesses.  Challenges include finding a strategy to hide the cracks
between adjacent tiles draw with different levels of details (and possibly
more or less details on the edges.)  You also have issues of objects
floating or being partially (completely) burried if the underlying terrain
becomes coarser or more detailed (or you have to move the objects up or
down which can also be odd looking.)  Of course there is the whole issue of
processing/managing the GIS data, and generating the tiles to support
whatever LOD scheme is chosen.

When the FlightGear scheme was originally devised, there was a leaning in
the flight sim world away from LOD schemes and back towards just drawing
all the tiles in full detail -- again, this is just another strategy on the
continuum of available options with it's own strengths and weaknesses.

Keep in mind that some of the popular strategies of the day are popular
because they are developed in response to the typical capabilities of
current gamer hardware.

After we committed to our strategy, continuous level of details algorithms
began to really catch steam and become popular -- thinks like ROAM.  These
algorithms were designed to minimize how many vertices were sent to
the graphics hardware every frame.  But again, they have their strengths
and weakness -- nothing that can't be solved or worked around, but only
through a large amount of effort to do what we need for a generic
flight simulator trying to model the entire world.

But then (maybe a bit like clothing styles), the capabilities of consumer
3d hardware improved and began to be able to store the actual geometry
right on the card.  Shader language effects became popular, and there was
less need to send the geometry to the video card every frame.  More and
more of the rendering was right on the card.  That led to less popularity
with ROAM type algorithms because they are always sending the new geometry
over to the card each frame and you end up not utilizing the full
capability of the graphics hardware.

So there is always the universal principle that it's faster to do less
work.  But styles and algorithm popularity is a moving target as hardware
is a moving target.  If we were building a game that would go to market in
the next 6 months and be removed from the shelves a few months later, we
would probably use a different strategy compared to our development process
which started in 1996 and does follow the trends to some degree, but a
little less aggressively and a little more skeptically because we would
like to run on hardware from a few years ago, on hardware 6 months from
now, and on hardware 5-10 years from now.

Curt.


On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Mathias Fröhlich wrote:


 Hi Adrian,

 The same idea is behind the osg lod based whole world model.
 Where do you store the elevation data?

 Greetings

 Mathias



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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 18:39:47 Mathias Fröhlich wrote:
 Hi Adrian,
 
 The same idea is behind the osg lod based whole world model.
 Where do you store the elevation data?
 
 Greetings
 
 Mathias
 

Hi Mathias,
It's actually nothing really special about it, I'm just modifying a little the 
tile manager to define inner tiles and outer tiles. The elevation data is 
inside the same old BTG files, which are actually lists of polygons making a 
tile mesh, hence why it's hard to simplify on runtime this mesh.
The Terragear team might now more about this.
This is just a few lines of code modification to decrease memory usage by 
really detailed scenery and allow a greater terrain loading range. So 
nothing's changed about the terrain format itself.

Cheers,
Adrian

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[Flightgear-devel] Performance

2012-12-16 Thread Torsten Dreyer
Hi everybody,

I just had the chance to compile a recent git-pull on my old and 
battered linux-notebook workhorse and with great delight, I noticed that 
I can run FlightGear again with 26fps at KSFO. I had to strip down most 
eye candy shaders for the GeForce Go 7400 but 3D clouds render fine 
without a noticable drop in framerate, even if a cloud spawns the entire 
screen. That was much worse a few month ago when FlightGear barely ran 
on that old hardware.

Whoever was involved in that magic - well done! Thanks for still 
supporting older and weaker hardware.

Torsten

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Mathias Fröhlich

Hi,

On Sunday, December 16, 2012 20:24:48 Adrian Musceac wrote:
 It's actually nothing really special about it, I'm just modifying a little
 the tile manager to define inner tiles and outer tiles. The elevation
 data is inside the same old BTG files, which are actually lists of polygons
 making a tile mesh, hence why it's hard to simplify on runtime this mesh.
 The Terragear team might now more about this.
 This is just a few lines of code modification to decrease memory usage by
 really detailed scenery and allow a greater terrain loading range. So
 nothing's changed about the terrain format itself.

Ok, so it's not really less level of detail.
It's just about stripping out the models to have bare btg's.
Right?

Mathias

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
 It' basically very simple. Far tiles no longer compute anything other than
 it's own geometry, and also use a very low resolution texture set, obtained by
 running a batch resize on the regular texture set.

OK. So you don't load anything other than the BTG file (e.g. no placed objects)?

I'm surprised there's any benefit to using a very low resolution texture set.
Surely the normal textures are already loaded by OSG and it's cheaper
just to refer
to those rather than loading some more textures?  Or are we not
sharing our textures
between tiles?

-Stuart

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread James Turner

On 16 Dec 2012, at 19:18, Stuart Buchanan wrote:

 I'm surprised there's any benefit to using a very low resolution texture set.
 Surely the normal textures are already loaded by OSG and it's cheaper
 just to refer
 to those rather than loading some more textures?  Or are we not
 sharing our textures
 between tiles?

Right, I had exactly the same thought.

Of course, if by some terrible mistake we aren't sharing textures, that would 
be a very big bug, but hopefully easy to fix!

James


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 21:37:37 James Turner wrote:
 On 16 Dec 2012, at 19:18, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
  I'm surprised there's any benefit to using a very low resolution texture
  set. Surely the normal textures are already loaded by OSG and it's
  cheaper just to refer
  to those rather than loading some more textures?  Or are we not
  sharing our textures
  between tiles?
 
 Right, I had exactly the same thought.
 
 Of course, if by some terrible mistake we aren't sharing textures, that
 would be a very big bug, but hopefully easy to fix!
 
 James
 

I'm replying to multiple messages here:
James: I have no clue how and if the textures are shared, or if the osg cache 
is related to this. All I know is that I can see a difference. I could explain 
it in my simplistic view: the current position holds the large textures for 
all material within the inner zones. If there are materials within the outter 
zone which are not within the inner zone, their effect is using a smaller 
texture, at least until they pass into the inner zone. So I could explain it 
like this: I have Road, DeciduousForest, DrypastureCover in the high res zone, 
and BroadleafForest,NeedleForest, Rock, Marsh Bog etc in the outter zone. No 
need to have high res Bog for a triangle 100 km away (keep in mind I also use 
large res textures, some of which were kindly commited by ThorstenR in the 
regional set).
Regarding the osg cache, I am not familiar with the way it works, and how it 
shares textures, so forgive me if I can't answer this.

Mathias, Stuart, yes I'm only loading the bare surface from the BTG, and not 
performing any tree, building, model calculations from them (they would be 
invisible at 20-30 km away, but the osg::LOD just hides it from view, does not 
prevent from loading in RAM all the objects).
Besides reduced scenegraph, the loading speeds for an outer tile are faster.
The tilecache model is also changed, so it does not look like a long tail 
behind the flightpath, but mostly as a rectangle around the plane. I reckon 
the tower view losing terrain should be dealt by disabling tower view when 
outside a reasonable distance from the tower.

The memory gains are those I spoke about before, and allow me to fly a long 
time in custom SRTM terrain without running out of RAM. I'd estimate a 1.5 - 2 
times improvement in memory cost vs. view distance, at a slight cost of 
increased disk IO (which is not noticeable, at least running in multithreading 
mode).

I am aware there are better systems out there, I'm just doing what I can 
within the restrictions of the BTG format. I'd be more than happy to have a 
real terrain LOD, but right now that means lots of changes in Terragear and 
simgear.

I'll publish the modifications tomorrow, If I can get around to clean the code 
a bit.


Cheers,
Adrian

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Emilian Huminiuc
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 19:37:37 James Turner wrote:
 On 16 Dec 2012, at 19:18, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
  I'm surprised there's any benefit to using a very low resolution texture
  set. Surely the normal textures are already loaded by OSG and it's
  cheaper just to refer
  to those rather than loading some more textures?  Or are we not
  sharing our textures
  between tiles?
 
 Right, I had exactly the same thought.
 
 Of course, if by some terrible mistake we aren't sharing textures, that
 would be a very big bug, but hopefully easy to fix!
 
 James

Running under gdebugger would suggest textures are indeed shared across tiles,
as I can't find any texture loaded twice.


Emilian,

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 21:18:10 Stuart Buchanan wrote:
 On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Adrian Musceac wrote:
  It' basically very simple. Far tiles no longer compute anything other
  than it's own geometry, and also use a very low resolution texture set,
  obtained by running a batch resize on the regular texture set.
 
 OK. So you don't load anything other than the BTG file (e.g. no placed
 objects)?
 
 I'm surprised there's any benefit to using a very low resolution texture
 set. Surely the normal textures are already loaded by OSG and it's cheaper
 just to refer
 to those rather than loading some more textures?  Or are we not
 sharing our textures
 between tiles?
 
 -Stuart

Stuart, James,
I'm actually not 100% sure about textures, but I have provided my explanation 
for the case of having x,y,z materials within the inner tiles, and a,b,c 
materials within the outer tiles (intersections between them are irrelevant, 
since are loaded anyway).
I'd prefer having a,b,c which are not supposed to be seen at high res, being 
small size, until the materials enter the inner tiles and load the large 
textures (if not already in cache). My explanation may be wrong, I don't stand 
by it 100%.

My main interest with terrain was a) having longer distances available, and b) 
having separate traversal masks only for surface. All for use in my infamous 
now radio code. This lead to what I have now, an improvement in memory usage 
and view distance.

All this has gotten me interested again in LOD systems. I'd like to see the 
day when the whole earth can be rendered like Mathias said.

Cheers,
Adrian

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Mathias Fröhlich

Hi,

On Sunday, December 16, 2012 22:02:15 Adrian Musceac wrote:
 I am aware there are better systems out there, I'm just doing what I can
 within the restrictions of the BTG format. I'd be more than happy to have a
 real terrain LOD, but right now that means lots of changes in Terragear and
 simgear.
Well, I suspect that this effect is easy to get without any additional manager. 
Not to speak about sophisticated continous lod.

Mathias

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 22:38:41 Mathias Fröhlich wrote:
 Hi,
 
 On Sunday, December 16, 2012 22:02:15 Adrian Musceac wrote:
  I am aware there are better systems out there, I'm just doing what I can
  within the restrictions of the BTG format. I'd be more than happy to have
  a real terrain LOD, but right now that means lots of changes in
  Terragear and simgear.
 
 Well, I suspect that this effect is easy to get without any additional
 manager. Not to speak about sophisticated continous lod.
 
 Mathias
 

Hi,
Suspect you're right, now after reading the required information :)
Would need to be a completely separate thing from our Terragear, and I'm not 
sure how Stuart's trees and buildings would fit in. Not to mention the lights.
But I see it possible now. I'll have to do a lot more reading though, this is 
definetly not my area.

Cheers,
Adrian

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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Mathias Fröhlich

Hi,

On Sunday, December 16, 2012 22:32:48 Adrian Musceac wrote:
 My main interest with terrain was a) having longer distances available, and
 b) having separate traversal masks only for surface. All for use in my
 infamous now radio code. This lead to what I have now, an improvement in
 memory usage and view distance.

Ok, for that, I can see a lot of solutions.

Having one that is may be close:
Use the BVH tree that is used in fgelev or fgai. The fgelev one is 
parametrized like you probably need today. There is one hacky switch in the 
BVH paging that only loads terrain into a bounding volume tree.

Have two different bvh trees and making sure that these nodes are not cached 
for scenery loading  - since they are incomplete in the sense of the visible 
viewer - would provide you what you need.

Since you are doing radio stuff I expect that your main workhorse is a line 
segment intersection which should be done best with this kind of structure.
True?
May be you need an other line segment visitor which measures the distance that 
is covered by material.

Ok, what might block this approach is the amount of static variables that is 
spread around. Already in face of reusability almost every global/static 
variable can be a serious problem ...

Look into fgelev and fgai and look for BVHPAger and its 
getBoundingVolumes(sphere) method.
May be flightgear is not really ready for this kind of shared usage, but the 
basic building blocks are there ...
Ok, in the end you might need an other custom approach. But just off my head 
what I think is probably best algorithmically.

Also keep in mind that tuesday is the deadline for new features for the next 
release.

Greetings

Mathias



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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Scenery manager

2012-12-16 Thread Adrian Musceac
On Sunday, December 16, 2012 23:11:44 Mathias Fröhlich wrote:

Hi Mathias,
 
 Ok, for that, I can see a lot of solutions.
 
 Having one that is may be close:
 Use the BVH tree that is used in fgelev or fgai. The fgelev one is
 parametrized like you probably need today. There is one hacky switch in the
 BVH paging that only loads terrain into a bounding volume tree.

I'm just using the get_elevation_m function from the scenery subsystem, 
inspired by Torsten's terrain sampler, but in a different way. This tests for 
nodes with SG_NODEMASK_TERRAIN_BIT set, which trees, houses, random buildings 
also have. Therefore I added a special bit only for surface 
SG_NODEMASK_TERRAIN_BIT, and accounted for it everywhere 
SG_NODEMASK_TERRAIN_BIT was referenced.
This way subgraph traversal are an order of magnitude faster since they don't 
use other stuff generated by the BTG loader which have that bit set.

If you want me to, I can place a simgear merge request and see what I changed 
and where wrt. traversal masks.

 
 Have two different bvh trees and making sure that these nodes are not
 cached for scenery loading  - since they are incomplete in the sense of
 the visible viewer - would provide you what you need.
 
 Since you are doing radio stuff I expect that your main workhorse is a line
 segment intersection which should be done best with this kind of structure.
 True?
 May be you need an other line segment visitor which measures the distance
 that is covered by material.

The principle is: have a general direction towards the radio station, go in 
that direction X meters (100-500 depending on setting) and get an elevation 
profile point. After acquiring a complete elevation profile for a path line, 
this is fed to the real algorithm which does all the hard calculations.

 
 Ok, what might block this approach is the amount of static variables that
 is spread around. Already in face of reusability almost every
 global/static variable can be a serious problem ...
 
 Look into fgelev and fgai and look for BVHPAger and its
 getBoundingVolumes(sphere) method.
 May be flightgear is not really ready for this kind of shared usage, but
 the basic building blocks are there ...

I'll have another look next week, it's a while since I studied that code. I 
don't think I need something more custom for now. The radio code is working 
just fine right now, but I'm definetly going to improve it in some areas, once 
it's merged. Featurewise, I'm not yet done either. I am also planning to get 
rid of the scenery subsystem dependency if possible.


 Ok, in the end you might need an other custom approach. But just off my
 head what I think is probably best algorithmically.
 
 Also keep in mind that tuesday is the deadline for new features for the
 next release.

I know, hence the whole discussion about this feature that took most of the 
mailing list space lately. Sorry about that. Let me know if you are interested 
in the traversal mask stuff that I have added to separate surface only, 
models, trees, random buildings etc. I can place a merge request tommmorow, 
but it has to go simultaneously in fg and simgear, since the traversal masks 
are used in both.

Cheers,
Adrian

 
 Greetings
 
 Mathias
 


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Re: [Flightgear-devel] Performance

2012-12-16 Thread Stuart Buchanan
Hi All,

While I hesitate to claim performance improvements I've not seen myself,
it may be that this was caused by this commit:

266b362238d0cef5a1c4df81bacbe941ee4c59ef

which discards transparent fragments.  I'd be very interested if you could
revert the changes in that commit and let me know if it makes any difference.

Thorsten R:  I've just committed a similar change to the lightfield 3d
cloud fragment
shader.  I don't notice any difference in rendering quality with the
change, but you
eye may be better than mine in this case :).

On a related note, I've also just pushed some changes to the 3d cloud rendering
such that sprites on the back of the cloud are not rendered if they are more
than 10km away (configurable in /sim/rendering/cloud3d-detail-range).
On my system
this gives 20-50% frame-rate increases, particularly under overcast conditions.

As always, I'm very interested to hear if this makes things better or
worse for others.

-Stuart

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