-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 David Megginson wrote: > On 31/10/2007, Christian Buchner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> 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 ... > > Our current terrain engine was great in the late 1990s (when MSFS > still had a flat world), but it's pretty stale now, mainly from a lack > of interest and the difficulty of understanding the code. It's > actually deteriorated in some ways -- note that all the Great Lakes > have been forced to sea level now, so that Lakes Huron, Michigan, and > Superior are in deep gorges, and all the cities beside them are > perched on cliff faces (that wasn't happening a couple of years ago). > I'm not sure that we should really be maintaining our own terrain > engine any more, though -- we should concentrate on aircraft models > and flight dynamics, and try to interface with an existing engine. That depends on where your interests lie, I suppose.
A flight simulator has specialized needs from a terrain engine: good close-up detail for near or on- earth operations, terrain stretching to a far horizon, no-pause loading of terrain from everywhere on the round earth, accurate material properties for ground polygons. I don't know of any free project that offers this. > > One promising prospect is Demeter, which works with OpenSceneGraph > (already supported by FGFS): > > http://www.tbgsoftware.com/index.html > > Unfortunately, Demeter itself seems to have gone a bit stale -- some > of the links from the site don't work any more, and it won't compile > with the latest version of OSG. It does, however, support LOD and > lots of other nice stuff (check out the screen shots!). Maybe someone > should take it over if the maintainer has abandoned it, or fork it if > the maintainer hasn't but is stalling on new releases. It doesn't do round-earth at all... > > The best thing we could do in FGFS, in the meantime, would be to > isolate scenery-engine dependencies so that it's easy to switch to a > new engine when it's ready. > That's not a bad idea; isolating the scenery engine would make it viable as an independent project as well. I think we have the expertise, both on the production / GIS side and the programming side, to create a first-class world terrain and terrain engine that would be taken up by other projects too. I personally want to work on this, but I need to help get our OSG house in order first. I'll start a Wiki page with some of my ideas (which aren't very original). Tim - -- Red Hat France SARL, 171 Avenue Georges Clemenceau 92024 Nanterre Cedex, France. Siret n° 421 199 464 00056 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHKYymeDhWHdXrDRURAqb6AJ9z96Jop7f3p7W4Ry64VMvJkE90LQCdF/Sf lWYlhMue+BYRO3Q7e1Dt9ew= =2vto -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
