Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft modellers - is a grain texture useful?
I'd say no , its easy enough to do without yet another shader, since each new shader 'improvement has me tweaking my aircraft to get back the frame rates I lost.But thanks for offering. Well, according to GLSL specifications and my experiments, texture lookups cannot be made conditional on a varying, but they can be conditional on a uniform integer. Which means that this can be implemented optionally without any performance overhead if the feature is not needed (that's not how the model ubershaders currently are written, they read textures regardless of the config flags, so I suspect they run slower on low quality levels than they really have to. I have been given to understand that this is because of Mac/ATI driver issues, but my medium quality terrain shaders read textures conditional on uniform int flags, and for me this gave a performance gain - seems to run fine on Mac and ATI as well, so it doesn't seem to be a nVIDIA exploit). I would follow the same opinion as Syd. I think Gimp/Inskape/Photoshop... are enough powerful to create correct texture. Well gimp is nice, but: Using 8192x8192 textures, with a 2x2 m cockpit size to texture, you get 0.25 mm resolution and have a 128 MB texture file. Using a 1024x1024 texture with a 256x256 overlay, you get pretty much the same resolution with 2 MB worth of textures. using a 1024x1025 overlay, you still have 4 MB textures only and can create 4 times the resolution. So there's that. The fact of the matter is that very few aircraft are textured in high quality (even a really good aircraft like the b1900d has lots of monochromatic surfaces on the panel) and if we had a library of a few overlay pattern, it would not require a photoshop artist but just a few lines of xml to fix that for good. The fact of the matter is also that once I turn my head and look away from the panel, the texture resolution in pretty much all aircraft decreases dramatically. But okay, I asked for feedback and I got it - point taken, feature not considered interesting from the modeller side. * Thorsten -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Improved Basic Weather integration with Atmospheric Light Scattering
No ,Advanced weather forced 3d clouds on me even when i disable 3d clouds so i don't use it. Of course i could be doing something wrong , but Im not quite convinced yet to get a new computer. Looks like I'll have to pretty soon ;) Interesting, I thought the 3d cloud checkbox was a shader-disabling button and the 3d clouds would disappear for lack of a rendering technique. Anyway, yes, Advanced Weather doesn't support 2d clouds, so if you want them, you can't use it, and you're not doing anything wrong. * Thorsten -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Rembrandt and ALS combined or switchable
I was wondering if there is a future plan in uniting these two amazing attributes of FG... My development plan as outlined for the period between 2.10 and 3.0 (hopefully...) http://wiki.flightgear.org/User:Thorsten is still valid: 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 suspect the programming challenges must be more than easy, yet I assume we would all like to have these features together, without having to quit and edit config files for choosing one of them at a time. I'm not a frequent Rembrandt user, but my understanding is that you have to start Rembrandt with a certain set of commandline options, but don't have to edit config files. Can you elaborate? I was wondering, could a button between Rembrandt and Atmospheric Light Scattering be made in-game so that one can be turned off, thus allowing the other to be turned on?? Starting from the default rendering scheme, Rembrandt is a change in rendering architecture, whereas Atmospheric Light Scattering is merely (?) a change in effect and shader code. Which is to say that Atmospheric Light Scattering has to be largely re-written to work inside the Rembrandt architecture, and which is why one can switch in-sim from default to Atmospheric Light Scattering (because they use the same architecture) but not from default to Rembrandt. Maybe Fred can explain this better. I've been given to understand that the easiest way to implement things inside the Rembrandt framework is to make all computations in the fragment shader - this is now done, ubershader-lightfield.frag contains all the main operations of lighting and fogging in five distinct and well-structured code blocks. I assume they would be more or less run when just copy/pasted into their counterpart locations in the Rembrandt framework. So the current roadblock is that someone sufficiently familiar with the structure of Rembrandt needs to write a skeleton framework and move these bits where they belong and implement the xml logic to switch things on and off. Once such a skeleton exists, I could take over from there and modify and adapt it to get all the procedural texturing and other fragment postprocessing effects in. What I can't do easily is design the skeleton from scratch, because I know only for ~ 2/3 of the lines in effect files what they're actually for (to be able to modify an existing file is not the same as being able to come up with one from scratch, especially if that is supposed to work in a different architecture...), and I have no prior experience in Rembrandt, and 'would be nice to have' is not sufficient to motivate me to spend a lot of time learning all of this. The offer stands - if anyone does the skeleton using what's in ubershader-lightfield.frag and gets a minimal system running in Rembrandt, I'll do the rest. * Thorsten -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Rembrandt and ALS combined or switchable
Hej Thorsten! :) From: thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi To: flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:22:42 + Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Rembrandt and ALS combined or switchable I was wondering if there is a future plan in uniting these two amazing attributes of FG... My development plan as outlined for the period between 2.10 and 3.0 (hopefully...) http://wiki.flightgear.org/User:Thorsten is still valid: 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 suspect the programming challenges must be more than easy, yet I assume we would all like to have these features together, without having to quit and edit config files for choosing one of them at a time. I'm not a frequent Rembrandt user, but my understanding is that you have to start Rembrandt with a certain set of commandline options, but don't have to edit config files. Can you elaborate? Oops, I use FG with .fgfsrc, so I have the Rembrandt command on a line which I comment/uncomment. Sorries for not clarifying this. I was wondering, could a button between Rembrandt and Atmospheric Light Scattering be made in-game so that one can be turned off, thus allowing the other to be turned on?? Starting from the default rendering scheme, Rembrandt is a change in rendering architecture, whereas Atmospheric Light Scattering is merely (?) a change in effect and shader code. Which is to say that Atmospheric Light Scattering has to be largely re-written to work inside the Rembrandt architecture, and which is why one can switch in-sim from default to Atmospheric Light Scattering (because they use the same architecture) but not from default to Rembrandt. Maybe Fred can explain this better. I've been given to understand that the easiest way to implement things inside the Rembrandt framework is to make all computations in the fragment shader - this is now done, ubershader-lightfield.frag contains all the main operations of lighting and fogging in five distinct and well-structured code blocks. I assume they would be more or less run when just copy/pasted into their counterpart locations in the Rembrandt framework. Is this why Rembrandt overrides any Antialias options I try to set? So the current roadblock is that someone sufficiently familiar with the structure of Rembrandt needs to write a skeleton framework and move these bits where they belong and implement the xml logic to switch things on and off. Once such a skeleton exists, I could take over from there and modify and adapt it to get all the procedural texturing and other fragment postprocessing effects in. What I can't do easily is design the skeleton from scratch, because I know only for ~ 2/3 of the lines in effect files what they're actually for (to be able to modify an existing file is not the same as being able to come up with one from scratch, especially if that is supposed to work in a different architecture...), and I have no prior experience in Rembrandt, and 'would be nice to have' is not sufficient to motivate me to spend a lot of time learning all of this. The offer stands - if anyone does the skeleton using what's in ubershader-lightfield.frag and gets a minimal system running in Rembrandt, I'll do the rest. This sounds like heavy-duty programming and it won't be easy, of course. But, again, the fruition of this merging will be immensely beneficial, as we all can imagine, I guess! * Thorsten Thanks and cheers!/KlearchosSE-MUA -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Flight Gear for Simulation Visualization
Hi Everyone, My name is Chris Fourie - I'm a master's student in control engineering. My work is in control systems for the autonomous flight of aircraft (primarily helicopters). We do most of our simulations in MATLAB and a few other things, and I'm looking for a good way to visualize the data that I generate in simulation. I'm hoping to use flight gear - I have the source code but I'm struggling to work out how everything fits together without detailed documentation. I'm looking to modify flightgear so that I'm able to set up a simulation environment (using UDP for online simulation) as well as use it for offline simulation (watching trajectories and motion using offline data that I've generated). I need to set up environments with static landing points as well as with moving platforms (eg. aircraft carriers) to ensure that the systems we design work. I'm a bit at a loss as to where to start - I don't have that much experience in graphics programming (not that I'm unwilling to learn though, its really interesting) and I can't seem to find detailed information on how everything in the code fits together. Is there any one that may have the time to help me or point me in the right direction? Many thanks, Chris Fourie ### UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN This e-mail is subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer published on our website at http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/ or obtainable from +27 21 650 9111. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please notify the author. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content. If this e-mail is not related to the business of UCT it is sent by the sender in the sender's individual capacity. ### -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] map and flight projection...
Hi, Seems in the latest 2.11 git, the 'map' has lost the forward projected yellow dotted line from the aircraft... Was this intentional? I thought the projection was a very good way to line up on an ILS, head to a VOR, etc, etc... Or is it a 'bug'? Or can I re-enable it somehow? Regards, Geoff. -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Aircraft modellers - is a grain texture useful?
Am Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:34:26 + schrieb Renk Thorsten thorsten.i.r...@jyu.fi: I have a question to aircraft/cockpit modellers: Would a shader effect with the equivalent of a grain texture be useful to you? For the terrain, the grain texture is a semi-transparent overlay pattern of grainy dots - which is superimposed on the normal texture at 25 times the nominal resolution (so while a usual pixel on the terrain might be 4x4 m sized, a pixel of the grain pattern is 16cm x 16 cm. This gives the appearance of a texture resolution which is much higher than it actually is: http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=47t=18628#p173410 In cockpits, I often see many monochromatic surfaces. When I look at the panel of my card, the plastic is monochromatic but has a fake leather pattern imprinted. The roof of my car has a cloth structure. My computer has some rhombus pattern imprinted. Metal surfaces often have some brush stroke structure. All these things are literally screaming for an overlay texture, as they are artificial repeating patterns and there is in fact no tiling problem as in terrain shading - they can just be superimposed, creating sub-millimeter-sized resolution on cockpit details at the expense of a single texture lookup. Now, I would offer to code a slot for a grain texture into the high-quality model shader of Atmospheric Light Scattering, but since I am not a 3d modeller and I suspect there are some issues with the uv-mapping which are a bit different from the way terrain works, I would need someone from the model side who is interested in exploring this idea. Let me know if anyone is interested. I like the idea. It is always a problem to get the Cockpit looking right. Using a high res texture gives a lot of details, but requires a lot of work and resources. Seamless textures save a lot of texture memory and improves the look of the wide areas a lot, but denies any use of e.g Ambient Occlusion. AO gives a somehow grainy appearence which looks ok, but with large interiours (e.g Transports, Bombers) it requires huge texture sizes to look good. I guess using a Shader for interiour will improve the overall look (I already use the model shader for interiour and it definitly improves the look and feel). Since I'm currently working on improving the Sabre Cockpit I would be ready to try some things out. Greetings * Thorsten -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] multiplay refuel test
NOTAM: To flyers who fly 'probe' enabled aircraft in Europe... or even if NOT... I will be flying the 'victor' refueling tanker for the next few days from KFPY, south 180 track, then turn around at the southern mountains, north on 360, at 12,000 feet – FL120 STD QNA – and am interested in 'hot' flyers who want to try air-to-air REFUELING (AAR) in suitably equiped aircraft, well ANY aircraft... The tanker will maintain, under autopilot, 220 knots (KTAS), at the said 12,000 feet, either 180 or 360, under the callsign GA006. The flights will commence about noon, or before, UTC, and close about 20:00 UTC. The track can be followed using http://test.fgx.ch, or other mp map URLS. Click on 'GA006' to localize... Reason: (a) I have tried with several aircraft over the last few days, and learned that this is QUITE difficult, but I hope NOT impossible! (b) The present suggested pps (Hz) is 10 when you set up –multiplay=, but FG 2.11 has fill-in extrapolation code when fgfs packets do not arrive in time, so maybe this is too high. This is the basic question... So the idea is to reduce this IFF this fill-in code helps, ie does its job... The theoretic idea is that with this code we can reduce the bandwidth used by 10 Hz to perhaps 2-4 Hz, but this needs to be FULLY tested, and confirmed... Now I have tried this over several day, in several aircraft – A-10, f-14b, a4 and failed, FAILED to touch the trailing drogues... it is TOUGH... autopilots help you get to the 'zone' but it needs manual flying to get to the RIGHT PLACE... If you are using a joystick maybe you need to even adjust the dead spot and the 'sensitivity' of the inputs... lots of learning, understanding and doing fgdata xml changes... And I have had a few pilots joining in ad hoc, but so far no one has actually contacted with the trailing outer wing drogues... The 'victor' can refuel 2 aircraft at a time... and I would LOVE to see/capture that... One, french I think, got so frustrated at his attempts, began firing missiles at the tanker. Thankfully, he MISSED, but was CLOSE ;=)) Also if you alert me to your attempt to refuel from my tanker, via mp chat, email, fgcom, … AND I am on board at the time -: (a) I will offer a VIRTUAL bottle of good Bordeau rouge to the first pilot who maintains drogue contact for say a minute, or more ;=)) (b) I will take some screen shots and post them. Be warned, during a screen shots (F3), fgfs stops sending mp packets for up to a second or so, and in the close fgfs the fill-in (extrapolation) code is activated, with some interesting, and sometimes quite alarming effects... Also I have heard others mention that the live metar update can also cause mp packet delays. The tanker will be flying under the 'Fair weather' scenario to avoid this. Maybe you should choose this as well... I really seek help from other pilots to analyse this multiplayer bandwidth situation. We have chosen 10 Hz, but WHY? Can less than 10 Hz be used with no adverse effect? That is the BIG question... Simply, what really is the optimum packets-per-second (pps) rate? Maybe it changes depending on circumstances... We know the lower the Hz the lower the bandwidth used by FGMS servers... but can the extrapolation code fill-in for the missing packets? Is 10 Hz good? Should it be higher, or lower depending on circumstance.. Lots to learn... Of course I am sure there are OTHER ideas... Hope you can help, and have some FUN at the same time;=)). Look forward to seeing you on my rear view... and I will take some pics... Regards, Geoff. CC: to users list... BCC: to others... -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] Linux nightly builds
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi, I'm working in a local version of Jenkins to set up a nightly build for Linux Ubuntu and allow them to be uploaded to a PPA, so that non-developers can test the nightly builds. Since Launchpad doesn't allow pre-built debs, I'm planning on doing a test build to make sure it compiles in the first place and then uploading the source code to Launchpad for it to compile. Eventually, I'm hoping that the official releases can be prepared and uploaded to Launchpad from Jenkins itself. - -- Saikrishna Arcot -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJRbzbfAAoJEDg9nXyl50AFaEEP/RAqcJPDajBjMYGqxuy0hmbc WozarvSYyK/3C0FicOGVmHECkTPcmqV0a74HOQWMOHvQuhU7P3Ku+2ILl/J1WFrJ tbAwjzOEdnCmxa+IgDMwpM2yzeTnDZiQfrUYbAKhopsE/+s8XkyiLgIJ99fy4sTW q62kMEyW2FklhSWQm6uW6vs42xITOxeW0W1XoG95+qYh/XTUEtqxoBSktiMQMbGK x0/eqHoMDK7zOTWm/1Hf2pxOOm69f63hHg5PZRi4UlpYtCNxhMJuI2qNX2Jlk9+7 4qeWvyHXWp/SDtlSvcSd+o0XnEPaLcJGdBg6wjGN3DLYOeraB33EKWmuuV4crC5S OMWk+nzgFckOw717uaPdP0UxB116k+EJ8DfADE09/borTv+WS3ZXwgjBMNIGnMc3 S8TcSU8Z4pIn5a5fo3DZtaf8Wf+2Om5GW13cpSg0LeEoghE31mtIvH6RV3Cu710x YW9RglbUgeIKeWt5CFp/iEKwfFEzAY6W2eaAuuJzJxjpaAltsBzroUzej6lWXSeg doVEw+PrYt4Ej46TIIXxt2SZV2J8NFAvleZJYJvprQpvqAOZwzBc57i3ti0V13Sp /V3p6KO0LyNjrxnZBjJgbhGWKh9qjxOKYhcrkEW60yOHj+/rrNq961oW390Sd3uq OpUb0zWBz5UMRshdEq+k =qKP/ -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Flight Gear for Simulation Visualization
Hi Chris, Flightgear will already visualize external data, I've done it, just not that often or recently and I can't remember the steps. Have a look at Docs/readme.IO and Docs/readme.protocol and look at the prewritten protocol files in Protocol/ Ron On Wednesday 17 April 2013 02:31:21 Christopher Fourie wrote: Hi Everyone, My name is Chris Fourie - I'm a master's student in control engineering. My work is in control systems for the autonomous flight of aircraft (primarily helicopters). We do most of our simulations in MATLAB and a few other things, and I'm looking for a good way to visualize the data that I generate in simulation. I'm hoping to use flight gear - I have the source code but I'm struggling to work out how everything fits together without detailed documentation. I'm looking to modify flightgear so that I'm able to set up a simulation environment (using UDP for online simulation) as well as use it for offline simulation (watching trajectories and motion using offline data that I've generated). I need to set up environments with static landing points as well as with moving platforms (eg. aircraft carriers) to ensure that the systems we design work. I'm a bit at a loss as to where to start - I don't have that much experience in graphics programming (not that I'm unwilling to learn though, its really interesting) and I can't seem to find detailed information on how everything in the code fits together. Is there any one that may have the time to help me or point me in the right direction? Many thanks, Chris Fourie ### UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN This e-mail is subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer published on our website at http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/ or obtainable from +27 21 650 9111. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please notify the author. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content. If this e-mail is not related to the business of UCT it is sent by the sender in the sender's individual capacity. ### -- Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
