Christian Buchner schrieb: > Hello everyone, > > my name is Christian Buchner. I am responsible for the notoriously > troublesome "Tileproxy" addon for > FSX and FS 2004. I have recently had a look at FlightGear - I compiled > it on Windows XP and I am quite > determined to do some hacking on the terrain engine. > > I would like to get a few pointers where to look for information about > the terrain engine that is currently used by > Flight Gear. In particular about the irregular terrain mesh - how is > it created (at runtime or offline) and how does > photo texture currently get mapped onto terrain - how are roads and > other terrain features added? (is it all > vector or is it texture maps) > > Some things that I would be interested in working on are: > - dynamic terrain tesselation, dynamic LOD > - terrain self shadowing (shadow maps) > - offloading some of the above to other CPU cores > - shaders for water surfaces > - mapping phototerrain dynamically (potentially reusing some Tileproxy > code) > - more shaders for atmospheric effects > > OpenGL and OpenScene Graph are quite new to me, before I've done some > basic DirectX and some > basic shaders (up to Shader model 1.4) So it will be a steep learning > curve for me. > > First I need to learn about the capabilities and limitations of the > existing terrain engine. So any > resources you can point me to would be appreciated. > > I would like to point some eyeballs towards an interesting technique > that was employed in the following > work published 2 years ago: They use z displacement mapping with > Vertex Shader 3.0 to get some > astounding detail at high FPS. Now map phototerrain on top of that and > you have a winner ;-) > > http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_liu_diva-5623-1__fulltext.pdf > > (try to ignore the military aspect of this work - the technology iused > s quite interesting) > > Christian > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hi Christian,
if I understand you right and you want to contribute to FlightGear on the basis of the GNU licence then you're welcome. I am not developing FG code but I might give you some information: > I would like to get a few pointers where to look for information about > the terrain engine that is currently used by > Flight Gear. In particular about the irregular terrain mesh - how is > it created (at runtime or offline) OFFLINE, via TerraGear http://wiki.flightgear.org/flightgear_wiki/index.php?title=Building_Terragear > and how does > photo texture currently get mapped onto terrain - how are roads and > other terrain features added? (is it all > vector or is it texture maps) Very simple, also OFFLINE. Roads and rivers are parts of the irregular terrain mesh, no vector overdrawing or texture-overlay (that would ease correcting or improving a local scenery) The terrain engine is one of the weak points of FlightGear and far behind the development of other parts. You can only change part of the terrain by recompiling the stuff offline with Terragear, only a few people outside the hardcore FG developers could get it compile and run - I could not. So there is only few development by other contributers. Scenery designers like me would like to make the rivers and seas look more realistic or get some better streets/elevation/groundtextures into the scenery. This is very hard to realize. Therefore we have two different scenery enhancement ideas (which do not exclude each other after my opinion) which we discussed a lot on the German FlightGear Forum: 1. Getting better scenery details for wide areas without buying any data - the Landsat7 project http://www.custom-scenery.org/Building-Scener.331.0.html Here a semi-automatic scanning of prepared Landsat 7 pictures can result into a much more detailed scenery. There are two areas available for FlightGear, the "Berlin Linuxtag scenery" and (as far as I remember) the "Bodensee scenery". Although the process of scanning these pictures is not easy due to the low resolution and the software and AI is under development the result was fascinating in my eyes. The aim of this project is to enhance the local scenery worldwide automatically by scanning the LS7 stuff. This is far! from working but a very interesting branch of development. 2. Texturing the terrain independant from the elevation mesh http://www.rotblind.de/fgstuff/fgst/seerhein.jpg This is a very early project but very interesting a) the possibility to texture with user made material for certain areas b) "on the fly" generation of textures with the terrain-data whe have in our database This could look like these samples (only the insider will see the difference to the "original" terrain stuff, this is NOT FS$ eyecandy, but we would like a little more of that) If you (Christian) can read and understand German you should have a look at the German FlightGear Forum: http://www.flight-gear.de/smf/index.php/topic,382.90.html and contact Seb via the Forum eMail. Otherwise, if your name lead me astray, mail me and I give you his eMail to contact him in Englisch language. Seb might be very busy actually with his studies but I think he has some time left for you as he put a lot of efford into this work the last months. 3. There is also one Czech FG user who obviously textured his terrain - but he did not reply to a mail, Seb sent to him (as far as I know). http://javky.rozhled.cz/ I hope, this helped you a little - and I hope you join the team! Regards Georg EDDW There are two people trying to develop scenery enhancement for FG, with two different ways: 1. Making the existing scenery more detailed ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
