Re: [Flightgear-devel] Website updates
This is just a thought, and since I'm definitely no expert at the internals, please feel free to bash the idea. This seems like a possibly reasonable way to add other elements to the scenery, such as buildings, towers, bridges, roads, etc. I'm just a college kid, haven't actually worked on anything major, haven't done massive amounts of research Flightgear or otherwise, and have been interested in Flightgear for a few years. The following has probably been tried, and discarded, but bear with me. Why not use a secondary scenery file, something that works a bit like an overlay. Example, a building, in this case, lets make it a cube (nice and regular :) Set the bottommost point (a centerpoint, if you will) in the center of the x-y plane. The z setting of this point will be at ground level (if it's halfway up the building, the part of the building below the point should be buried). A vector in the building data to point north (or other standard direction, like down or up) to make sure the building gets shown in the right orientation. Now for the magic (or something): Take the ground level of the scenery at the centerpoint of the object, and make that the altitude of the z coordinate of the object. Unless there were an inordinate/complicated amount of scenery, that might be a solution. It's similar to the dynamic scenery, except the locations of objects are predefined. Roads could be done in a slightly different way, such as a network of lines (I'm probably just proposing what's already been done). The endpoints are given as lat/lon. Since roads almost always follow the terrain (except for over/underpasses, tunnels, and other cuts through the terrain, the same map the ground level to the z coordinate idea should work for roads. Realistically, I don't see why a secondary package can't take a pregenerated ground scenery file, extract the required information with some overlay source information, and create an overlay file with all of the required information in some sensible format (after all, roads are just two points connected by a line). This overlay could even be optional, in case someone wishes to use a pristine scenery set. JD Alex Perry wrote: James A. Treacy writes: This brings up something I've been wondering for a while. It appears we can add roads and rivers. Why, then, isn't this the default? David replies: Unfortunately, to get roads, railroads, and rivers, we have to give up some quality in the terrain mesh. You don't notice much in flat terrain, but sometimes the mountains come out looking funny. Can we do it on a tile-by-tile basis ? If the range of altitude from minimum to maximum (in one tile) is less than 200 ft then do roads because the terrain will look essentially flat from any sensible altitude. ___ 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] Website updates
David Megginson writes: Erik Hofman writes: It might be usefull to rearrange the website, to let the Table of Contents show up first on the page. It would be a good idea to add the News and Project Overview sections to the table of contents then. I'd suggest that starting with screenshots is a better idea -- we don't want to waste a lot of screenspace or bandwidth, but we do want to give a first-time visitor an idea of why it's worth spending more than 3 seconds looking at FlightGear. The pictures show the current state of the project much more efficiently than text could. FWIW IMHO pictures do not belong on the main page at all !!! I am in complete agreement with Eric's suggestion that 'index.html' should be just our Logo, Table of Contents, Search Form, Counter and Credits. Norman ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
RE: [Flightgear-devel] Website updates
Norman Vine wrote: FWIW IMHO pictures do not belong on the main page at all !!! Instead IMHO we should present a 'well organized' entry point that is viewable on one page so as to impress our visitors with our 'professionalism' FWIW - One of my favorite sites is http://www.google.com Which I believes demonstrates well that a 'minimalist' front page can be quite successful as it is the 'content served' and 'navigational ease' that is most important to a projects popularity and usefulness. Cheers Norman ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Website updates
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Megginson) [2002.07.22 11:48]: Norman Vine writes: FWIW IMHO pictures do not belong on the main page at all !!! I'm not a graphics fan myself. I hate Flash pages (with an intensity that would scare many of you), I hate big logos, I hate complex layout, etc. etc. I like to make my own Web pages work well not only under lynx but on my cell phone text display. On the other hand, when I go looking at other open-source projects' home pages, what I almost always want to find is 1. a screenshot snip/ I agree with both of you. I don't like the current homepage. It's rather ugly with the 8 thumbnails spread out over the page. I do like having a 'state of our art' screenshot though. I'd suggest adding one or two thumbnails just before the ToC. If you want to see more, then go to the galleries where all other screenshots should go. A related nit I have with the current homepage snapshots is that they show things we don't currently have in FG, ie. rivers, roads, etc. I think we should stick with what is actually in CVS, not what David (or anyone) has cooked up on their home box. We should show people what they should expect to see when they download FG, not what they will see after an overnight scenery building process... -- Cameron Moore [ How do they get the deer to cross at that yellow road sign? ] ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] Website updates
Cameron Moore writes: * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (David Megginson) [2002.07.22 11:48]: Norman Vine writes: FWIW IMHO pictures do not belong on the main page at all !!! I'm not a graphics fan myself. I hate Flash pages (with an intensity that would scare many of you), I hate big logos, I hate complex layout, etc. etc. I like to make my own Web pages work well not only under lynx but on my cell phone text display. On the other hand, when I go looking at other open-source projects' home pages, what I almost always want to find is 1. a screenshot snip/ I agree with both of you. I don't like the current homepage. It's rather ugly with the 8 thumbnails spread out over the page. I do like having a 'state of our art' screenshot though. I'd suggest adding one or two thumbnails just before the ToC. If you want to see more, then go to the galleries where all other screenshots should go. A related nit I have with the current homepage snapshots is that they show things we don't currently have in FG, ie. rivers, roads, etc. I think we should stick with what is actually in CVS, not what David (or anyone) has cooked up on their home box. We should show people what they should expect to see when they download FG, not what they will see after an overnight scenery building process... If someone wants to work on improving the web pages, please feel free to contribute. My main constraint is that you stick to plain old html, keep it simple, clean, and fairly low bandwidth. And it would be nice if it continued to be relatively navigable by a text browser. 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
RE: [Flightgear-devel] Website updates
What does it take to build the scenery? I have a dual Athlon 1.2 Ghz Machine with lots of disk space and a Netra T1 (Sun Box) available to build scenery. Is there a guide on how to do this somewhere?? Ryan If you are talking about buildings, see the response David Megginson made to my post: --- cut here --- WE NEED BUILDINGS! Jon S Berndt writes: Can you explain: 1) Which tools would one make these with? 2) What format should they be saved in? 3) What guidelines should be followed regarding complexity, textures, etc.? David replied: 1. Tools For Posix-based operating systems like Linux, the best two candidates are AC3D and Blender (my preference); under Windows, there are many more choices, still including Blender and (I think) AC3D. Blender is free-as-in-beer, and may be free-as-in-speech soon if they can raise $100K or so to buy out the NaN shareholders. 2. Format Plib supports a variety of 3D formats, but AC3D support seems the most solid (I export my Blender models in AC3D format). The VRML loader doesn't seem to handle textures, which is a big pain. 3. Guidelines For most buildings, I'm trying to keep the polygon count very low -- one quad for a tree, five for a basic building, 9 for a barn, and so on. I'm using mostly 64x64 SGI RGB-format textures, with 32x32 for small things like cows. Be creative -- most of the time the viewer will be pretty far away anyway. For scaling, FlightGear uses the convention that one unit = one meter. Try to keep the colours dull and the design generic (i.e. no adobe churches, cabanas, or maple sugar shacks). All the best, David --- cut here --- If you are talking about scenery other than buildings, I have even less to offer in the way of answers, but isn't that what TerraGear is for? Maybe you should visit that site? www.terragear.org? Jon smime.p7s Description: application/pkcs7-signature
