On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Renk Thorsten wrote:
It has emerged from forum discussions that gathering the goals for developers
so that people can synchronize efforts better and users know what to expect
would be a good idea. I've sort of been trying to do that previously, so I
might as well continue, even if it's a bit early and 2.10 isn't rolling out
yet.
My project goals till a 3.0 release are:
* Get a high-quality model shader running under Atmospheric Light Scattering
Pretty straightforward, has been requested a number of times, it's on the
agenda and I hope to have it in the next month
That's great news, and feeds into one of my goals (see below).
* Implement a scheme for generating autumn colors procedurally
I'm currently on that by encoding the amount of autumn color rotation in the
texture alpha channel - some proof of principle here:
http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47t=18580
There are still open questions how to do trees efficiently (I would like to
switch to the autumn version of trees at some point, but I don't know how to
do this without always loading both sheets. It'd be way more efficient to
simply color-rotate the tree texture sheet, but then I don't know how to
discriminate needle trees on the mixed forest sheet) and lots of detail work
needs to be done, but I expect that we'll soon be able to generate lots of
different seasonal and environment-influenced themes from the same basic
texture set. It'll never be as good as creating dediicated autumn textures,
but... it smoothy interpolates between summer and autumn.
One idea I used with the 3D clouds was to use the position of the
texture in the texture sheet to encode additional information. In
that case, cloud textures at the bottom of the sheet are used for the
bottom of the clouds.
Perhaps we could use something similar for the trees? I.e. pass in a
uniform indicating which fraction of the texture sheet on the x-axis
should be color-rotated. The uniform can be taken from a property on
the material definition.
* Atmospheric light scattering and Rembrandt
After thinking about this for a while, I have decided that I am definitely
not going to do this on my own. Being maintainer of one major rendering
scheme and one weather system is quite enough to keep me busy, and it's not
something which is very close to my heart. However, if there is a decision
that there is going to be a team effort making this work, I will join it and
do my part.
I'm very keen that the atmospheric light scattering and procedural
effects are merged fully into both the classic and Rembrandt
renderers, and would absolutely be part of any team effort to make it
happen. I'd really like to get to a position where the Atmospheric
Lighting checkbox in the Rendering dialog can be removed, as the
elements of the atmospheric renderer are simply part of the classic
and Rembrandt rendering schemes.
As part of that I think I need to make some changes to the Basic
Weather to populate the appropriate properties. Thorsten - are the
properties documented anywhere?
Other than that I don't have any significant plans for the next
release, though I do have some small projects in mind:
- Improvements to the A-4F
- Improving random building placement. While it looks OK for towns,
buildings aren't placed very well in cities.
- AI Tanker enhancements to allow users to select from a range of
tanker models. This is particularly relevant for naval probe-equipped
aircraft, where there is a much greater variety of tanker types.
-Stuart
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