> 2. Slider in Advanced Weather - Advanced Settings - sets a max value . > The > displayed vis in the min value of this and the value derived by Advanced > Weather. (Is this true? I'm only inferring this).
True. > 3. Checkbox named realistic visibility in Advanced Weather - Advanced > Settings. What does this do? I can't see any effect here. It changes the internal model used to derive visibility as a function of altitude. In reality, once you clear the lowest convective layer which is normally pretty hazy, the visibility often goes to hundreds of kilometers. The checkbox largely controls where Advanced Weather would set it - if you don't check it, visibility increases more slowly with altitude, if you check it, you will in many weather situations open the visibility to 120 km (or whatever max. value you specified) a few hundred meters above the lowest convective layer. Basically, checking the box means 'model my visibility as real as you can do within the FG framework' and unchecking it 'model it halfway realistically, but keep an eye on performance and memory issues'. > I used the old terms Basic/Advanced Weather, but I note that these have > disappeared from the GUI. How would the user know why or when he would > chose ether option? Scope for some rationalisation here I would think. The design idea behind the current GUI was that the user should no longer be presented with two different weather options to choose from, but just see a single GUI which controls weather. If that is still the idea, it works remarkably well. If you have an idea for a more descriptive text, please let us know. > This should be easily fixable by having the atmospheric scattering checkbox > set > the value of: > /sim/rendering/minimum-sky-visibility > to 0, and returning it to the default value when unchecked. Is there an xml way to do that? I know how to do it with a listener from Nasal, but that seems like an overkill... Or am I thinking too complicated? In other matters, I was able to make some progress. I've replaced the hard cutoff by a smoothed, sliding cutoff, so the circle is gone. Fogging clouds properly turns out a no-go because the fog color is way too expensive to obtain, but it occurred to me that one can cheat here - rather than fading to fog color, one can fade clouds to transparent for distances larger than 2-3 times visibility. That gives the desired disappearance of the cloud layer in poor visibility from below (I have to check if it has any undesirable side effects in situations with high visibility). It's also neat because the fragment shader will drop transparent pixels - so performance of fading to transparent is better than fading to fog color. Since there are still unspecified but serious concerns about loading 20 km of terrain, I've hacked my way around it... so please drop the idea. This is what CAT IIIb now results in: http://users.jyu.fi/~trenk/pics/catIIIb.jpg There are some remaining issues. Specular light is way too strong in the picture, I have to tune that down (that's also the case in default rendering). As you can see, the lights are way too visible for CATIIIb - it took me 5 minutes to figure out that they are actually 100% fogged, but since they are fogged in the default scheme for some reason, the fog color is much brighter, and so it seems as if they were unfogged. Does anyone know where the various runway and other lights enter the rendering pipeline and what should be done to get a shader to process them? Can they be assigned to model-default, or do they need extra treatment? A similar issue is the sun (which is never fogged). It used to be hidden by the clouds, but if we fade the clouds to transparent rather than to fog color, that no longer works. In the default scheme, I think the sun becomes hidden when the skydome unloads - but that doesn't work either, the scheme needs the skydome. So we'd need some control over what we show of the sun - that's also relevant if the sun is below the horizon, but the horizon terrain is rendered by the skydome - in this case the sun can be seen through the 'terrain'. Does anyone have an idea how we could control the appearance of the sun? * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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_feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
