* till busch -- Thursday 10 April 2008: > Currently Aircraft/ is ~1200 MB on cvs. So yes. I think we can easily afford > 100 or 200 MB for "cheap" ai models.
I don't mind spending 200MB for something useful. But I think that 200MB for a mere duplication of existing files is a waste. > I'd opt for inclusion of as many AI (lightweight) aircraft as possible. > People > who try FG, will see other models that they like, and will eventually > download them. If it's only about a motivation to download the "real" aircraft, then a dialog on exit is just as effective. And it's questionable whether crappy/blurry AI aircraft are such a big motivation at all. Maybe just the opposite. And high-quality duplicated AI files are a no-go IMHO. Because you'd then come much closer to the 1200MB. The *.ac and texture files are the biggest parts of an aircraft after all, only instruments and sounds wouldn't be duplicated (and the usually smallish nasal and xml files). > Could you propose a more detailed design that would allow all of that? > I would volunteer to write the necessary code. A possible solution and compromise could be: - $FG_ROOT/AI/Aircraft/ contains stripped down (model details and texture sizes) of all relevant aircraft, no matter if the aircraft is installed. Non-relevant ones are Ogel and Colditz, for example). - there's a property/option that controls whether such rather low quality models are used or not. They are somewhat ugly, but may or may not be considered better than nothing. - as soon as the real aircraft is installed ($FG_ROOT/Aircraft/), this takes precedence over AI/Aircraft/. Proper LOD setup in $FG_ROOT/Aircraft/*/ makes sure that this comes at low cost in the MP case. An additional flag <disable-on-mp/> or something added to an animation could be used to completely remove it in the MP case. (We might need a way to scale down textures, too?) I don't like the current setup much where MP-LOD is split off the real aircraft and resides in a separate dir. That's somewhat unclean. - aircraft could contain an indicator of their "costs", so that one could set an option at startup to only display aircraft cheaper than some threshold. m. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
