FWIW, I have been leaving updated notices on my home page for people that want more frequent or detailed updates on my progress:
http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
I believe I have now completed all my required "prep" work and am about ready to launch into a full blown world scenery build.
Most people won't see a lot of differences with the new scenery, but those that reported glitches or bugs or strange artifacts should see a *lot* less of those now.
1. Airports. I've put a lot of effort into airport surfaces and cleaned those up tremendously. I haven't claimed 100% victory yet, but generally they should be much better than before.
- There should not be any airports sunk below ground level (or raised up on pedastals.) (There may be some small amount of this due to the constraints of runway slope versus the surrounding terrain, but now we can tune this.)
- There should no longer be any wildly oscillating runway surfaces.
- There should be no runway surfaces with abrupt cliffs in them.
- We have added beautifully modeled rotating beacons, wind socks, and control towers to most airports that have them. The location of these items are stored in Robin's database, so if the position of these items are wrong, we can submit fixes for them.
- Along the way I fixed several other miscellaneous bugs in the airport generation code.
- Robin has made many updates to his airport database which will be reflected in this new build. This will be most noticable in terms of many new/corrected taxiways as well as the beacons, windsocks and towers mentioned earlier.
2. Land cover artifacts. The FG scenery combines 2d polygons (city outlines, lake outlines, evergreen-forest outlines, etc.) with 3d terrain data. Sometimes the length of a 2d polygon edge could be quite long ... if a long edge ran through a rough terrain area, it would leave a straight light artifact that was really weird and distracting.
- In the new build I have chopped up long polygon edges so that they can follow the underlying terrain shape much better. Now we can have land cover divisions (or roads) through complex terrain without adding unsightly artifacts. In the process of doing this work, I found/fixed a couple bugs in our polygon handling.
- Since our last major world build, high res terrain data (3 arcsec SRTM) has become available for Europe, Asia, and Africa. The new build will include this high res terrain.
3. If you have terrasync working (or can run rsync manually) you can get an early preview of this scenery by pointing to:
scenery.flightgear.org::Scenery-0.9.4
Note that this is a "preview" so the version number is a bit misleading. You will need the CVS version of FlightGear to get the most out of this new scenery.
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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