Thorsten wrote > > > Are the Winter textures still needed? > > In a sense they were never really needed... for instance I have never used > them. > > Just to summarize the options we have to generate snow: > > 1) Winter textures > > They are base texture sheets with snow painted on, which means they have > a fixed snowcover and no simulation of a snowline is possible. On the good > side, they do not need any shader technology and render with some margin > fastest of all snow options. > > 2) Snow texture overlay > > This uses shader technology to overlay a snow texture on the terrain, and is > the snow feature implemented in the default rendering scheme (I don't > know about Rembrandt, maybe also there?). This has a fixed snow coverage > but variable snowline and uses significantly more resources than 1) (needs to > read a second texture, needs to read noise textures, needs to compute the > local amount of snow based on terrain gradient). > > 3) Procedural snow > > This is a white base color modified by several noise functions. It has variable > snow coverage, i.e. can change from thin patches of snow to a thick layer, > and has a variable snowline. It is implemented in Atmospheric Light > Scattering at the higher quality levels. This needs about as much > performance as 2) and much more than 1) (evaluates terrain gradient and > several noise functions, but doesn't read any texture). > > If we want to have a CD-sized base package, and if we're fine with not > supporting snow on less powerful hardware, then we can remove the snow > textures. If we want to support snow on weak hardware, then they are > needed. > > A (more complicated) option would be to offer only one set of terrain > textures in the base package and offer the others as additional downloads. > Both the dds and the winter textures are probably relatively clean to > separate - as far as I know they're not shared across different schemes. > > My private opinion is that aiming for CD-size isn't that important and I would > leave everything in. >
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here: we now have so many different options, but getting snow by method 2 or 3 results in deciduous trees in full leaf with snow coverage on the ground. Not an impossible scenario, but bare trees are more likely. Is this a bug? So at least for now we need at least some winter textures and the ability to select to select them. Vivian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_jan _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
