How should we call our new baby? Is it 3.0.0 or is it 2.10.0? This is a
carry-over from our last release and gets answered along with: Is
Rembrandt production ready?
Hm, I had a list of items for a 3.0 half a year ago, so some progress chack
along these lines:
* Scanery-related
'Publish 3.0 along with a new version of hires world scenery, preferably making
best use of regional texturing'
- hires world scenery
- no idea, but doesn't seem to be coming any time soon...
- regional texturing
- I've done some work on that, Stuart has also done some, we currently have
regional definitions for Europe, Caribbean islands, Hawaii and tropical South
America committed, I've additional definitions for the Atacama desert and
Iceland almost ready which I'll hopefully be able to hand in next week(s). I
had hoped for more, since we've really made it easy to do that kind of work,
and since I tried to advertize the techniques in various places, so I would
have hoped that all the regional FG groups like FGUK or FG Brazil jump on the
waggon and do some of their terrain, but... So, we have some, but it could be
better.
* Weather-related
'Make a more intuitive interface for a common weather system, remove
long-existing bugs'
- common weather interface
- We have that now - for me it's a bit less nice to work with it (I need to
click through one more menu to get my detailed menu), I have the feeling it's
way better for the average user - I haven't heard much feedback, are there
opinions? Is this how people would like to control weather?
- rain bug
- that still persists, rain is broken in Advanced Weather since currently
setting the rain norm doesn't necessarily generate rain as the underlying
system tries to be smart and parses the cloud layer altitude of Basic Weather -
which is zero in Advanced Weather. Can anyone help here? I think this can be
fixed before the release.
- turbulence bug
- that still persists, setting turbulence magnitude norm to a given value
creates very different strength of turbulence in YaSim and JSBSim. I probably
could introduce a hack in the weather system that some FDM dependent scaling
factor is used, but I really think the weather system should *not* have to know
about the FDM - this violates any modularization idea, so I think this is an
FDM-side issue. Besides, the same issue must exist in Basic Weather (although
it's easier to make it go away since turbulence is user-controlled I guess...)
Likewise - I think this can be addressed before the release, it doesn't seem
exceedingly complicated.
* rendering-related
'Make effects work across different rendering schemes, support atmospheric
light scattering in Rembrandt'
- effects in atmospheric light scattering
- partially done, we have now water, urban, landmass and transition effects,
currently no support for crop/agriculture effects, the runway effect or model
effects. I will probably have a runway shader before thre release, but no
others. It turns out more complicated than anticipated to get it right, and I
lost a lot of coding time earlier this fall
- atmospheric light scattering in Rembrandt
- I haven't been looking much into Rembrandt, since it turns out too slow on
my current computer. Last Friday I got myself a new Qosmio X870 - if any
currently existing laptop can run Advanced Weather, Rembrandt and Atmospheric
Light Scattering together, than probably it's that one or a similar model. So I
have now the means to attack the problem.
On a personal note though, admittedly I get increasingly tired after more than
a year of shader work, and I would like to do so many other things, like tinker
a bit with the weather and do more regional texturing schemes, it's just so
frustrating to ask questions, read stuff, try to figure out how things are done
to run right into another unexpected roadblock like the z-Buffer issue for
clouds and the terrain, or the near/far camera problem and watch another week
of work go down the drain again. Or to sit a week trying to optimize shader
code to hear offhand comments like 'this really needs to be optimized, since it
runs so slow and on my computer I can run insert name of 3d game here without
problems, so it can't be my hardware'. So I don't know how much longer I will
be working on rendering schemes.
All in all, for my part it seems rather a 2.10 than a 3.0 - some of the things
which I'd like to see in 3.0 are done, but the majority isn't yet.
That's my 2 cents at least...
* Thorsten
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