RE: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
VS Renganathan writes: How about leaving the ascii format as it is 'without further support', so that we could continue using it. If its possible to leave it in a working condition without breaking that would be wonderful. Afterall the ascii format's similarity with Wavefront .obj format makes it quite useful for people like me to modify scenery without TerraGear. I just havent started using TerraGear and hope I would not be forced to do so. Ranga, I will leave the ascii format loader in place for now, but it is becoming increasingly 'dated' as time goes on. There will likely be some point in the future where we won't be able to move forward the way we'd want to and still preserve this compatibility. It might be worth discussing this 'offline' to see what your specific needs are and if we can find an easy path to get your local stuff updated. plib can load a variety of formats, so beyond the terrain and the airport object, you should be able add an arbitrary number of additional objects to the scene using the wavefront .obj format if you choose. Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Curt asked: Is anyone still using this ancient file format? Yes. Does anyone have any objections to ending support in flightgear for it? Is it easy to create a atg2btg converter (I only have btg2atg) or does someone write a btg importer/exporter to plib? If so, then it is completely ok by me. Mostly I don't change the scenery (only add objects via ind file etc) and also I work on this very seldomly, so even if there is no atg2btg and you need to remove the support, then I can live with it. BTW, in my experience developement is easier to do with ascii formats. For example, if your file contains polys with 100s of vertices, you see this at once in an ascii format, but might need hours or days to stumble upon this in a binary format. So I would guess TerraGear etc development would be easier if you keep the ascii, would it not? Thanks, Curt. Bye bye, Wolfram. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Wolfram Kuss writes: Is it easy to create a atg2btg converter (I only have btg2atg) or does someone write a btg importer/exporter to plib? If so, then it is completely ok by me. Mostly I don't change the scenery (only add objects via ind file etc) and also I work on this very seldomly, so even if there is no atg2btg and you need to remove the support, then I can live with it. BTW, in my experience developement is easier to do with ascii formats. For example, if your file contains polys with 100s of vertices, you see this at once in an ascii format, but might need hours or days to stumble upon this in a binary format. So I would guess TerraGear etc development would be easier if you keep the ascii, would it not? We have a tool already that dumps the contents of a binary object file into an ascii representation (and I do use it on occasion and it is very helpful.) :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
So Curtis L. Olson says: Wolfram Kuss writes: Is it easy to create a atg2btg converter (I only have btg2atg) or does someone write a btg importer/exporter to plib? If so, then it is completely ok by me. Mostly I don't change the scenery (only add objects via ind file etc) and also I work on this very seldomly, so even if there is no atg2btg and you need to remove the support, then I can live with it. BTW, in my experience developement is easier to do with ascii formats. For example, if your file contains polys with 100s of vertices, you see this at once in an ascii format, but might need hours or days to stumble upon this in a binary format. So I would guess TerraGear etc development would be easier if you keep the ascii, would it not? We have a tool already that dumps the contents of a binary object file into an ascii representation (and I do use it on occasion and it is very helpful.) :-) I would agree with Wolfram, ascii formatted files are a lot easier to develop with and debug. I also imagine they would be easier for someone starting out with scenery development, you can just pick up the format from the files that already exist. And storage space doesn't need to be huge, these types of formalized ascii files compress like crazy. How about some kind of compiler to convert the ascii files to binary? Then you could do development using the ascii files, but you could limit FlightGear itself to reading the binary version. Or does something like this already exist? Groeten,- Jacco -- Think about it: | In Real Life: Jacco van Schaik If the wheel had never been | Mail me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] reinvented, we'd still be | Spam bait:postmaster@localhost driving on logs...| See also http://www.frontier.nl/ ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
There is a binary to ascii converter named btg2atg (atg = ascii terra gear, btg = binary terra gear), but not vice versa, at least not that I know of. Bye bye, Wolfram. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Wolfram Kuss writes: There is a binary to ascii converter named btg2atg (atg = ascii terra gear, btg = binary terra gear), but not vice versa, at least not that I know of. There's not a reverse converter, but it wouldn't be that hard to do if someone wanted to make one ... Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Wolfram Kuss wrote: Curt asked: Is anyone still using this ancient file format? Yes. Does anyone have any objections to ending support in flightgear for it? Is it easy to create a atg2btg converter (I only have btg2atg) or does someone write a btg importer/exporter to plib? If so, then it is completely ok by me. I've been working on a btg importer for plib/ppe. Once I've got something useable I'll announce it on the appropriate mailing lists. atg2btg should be trivial to code. I might even have one sitting around some place. Cheers, Bernie ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Wolfram Kuss writes: There is a binary to ascii converter named btg2atg (atg = ascii terra gear, btg = binary terra gear), but not vice versa, at least not that I know of. There's not a reverse converter, but it wouldn't be that hard to do if someone wanted to make one ... I assert that anybody who wishes to pull ascii support out of the source tree should consider themselves obligated to provide a atg2btg converter first, otherwise scenery localization (a long term goal) won't happen. ... hi, Curt ... 8-) ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
I would be able to clean up a *lot* of code if I could jettison support for the old 'ascii' scenery format. None of the scenery on the ftp server is in the old ascii format. It consumes more space to represent the same geometry, file loading is slower, it hasn't been updated to support newer features of flightgear (nor do I want to do this.) The code to support this format is messy, and continuing to support it is messy, and we could clean up a lot of this by just dropping support for the ascii format Is anyone still using this ancient file format? Does anyone have any objections to ending support in flightgear for it? Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Curtis L. Olson writes: Is anyone still using this ancient file format? Does anyone have any objections to ending support in flightgear for it? I think that PPE has support for the old ASCII format but not the new binary one. Other than that, chuck it. All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
One thing to remember, once you leave the ASCII format, the platform's byte order becomes important. When you start storing data in binary format, you might want to use network format so the standard hton*() routines can be used. This probably seems obvious, but most of the network code I have seen assumes that all platforms share the same byte order (usually little-endian). Jonathan Polley On Sunday, March 3, 2002, at 03:08 PM, David Megginson wrote: Curtis L. Olson writes: Is anyone still using this ancient file format? Does anyone have any objections to ending support in flightgear for it? I think that PPE has support for the old ASCII format but not the new binary one. Other than that, chuck it. All the best, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] ancient 'ascii' scenery format
Jonathan Polley writes: One thing to remember, once you leave the ASCII format, the platform's byte order becomes important. When you start storing data in binary format, you might want to use network format so the standard hton*() routines can be used. This probably seems obvious, but most of the network code I have seen assumes that all platforms share the same byte order (usually little-endian). Yes, the binary scenery format and loader should be endian aware. We have been running with the binary format for a year (at least?) so the endian issues should be already taken care of. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
