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Building TerraGear: Difference between revisions
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== Introduction == | == Introduction == | ||
The terrain used in [http://flightgear.org FlightGear] -- the land over which one flies, its texturing (by land usage type), the rivers and lakes and so forth -- are generated by software from a sister project called [http://terragear.org TerraGear]. TerraGear is used to read in geographical data -- descriptions of ground elevations, land cover (usage) information, airport locations and layouts, and so forth -- and output terrain over which one can fly | The terrain used in [http://flightgear.org FlightGear] -- the land over which one flies, its texturing (by land usage type), the rivers and lakes and so forth -- are generated by software from a sister project called [http://terragear.org TerraGear]. TerraGear is used to read in geographical data -- descriptions of ground elevations, land cover (usage) information, airport locations and layouts, and so forth -- and output terrain over which one can fly. | ||
For a variety of reasons, you might want to build terrain yourself, rather than downloading it from the available scenery on FlightGear. For instance, if you use [http://taxidraw.sourceforge.net/ TaxiDraw] to modify/improve information about an airport's taxiway/apron layout, you might wish to see how that modified airport would look in the scenery before deciding you're happy with the results. And normally to see and use the airport in the scenery, it's necessary to [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/#Updates submit the changes to Robin Peel], have him sign off on the changes, have the changes appear in the next [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/ official apt.dat], and then wait for the next [http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html official FlightGear scenery] build; if you can build terrain yourself, you can start using it right away. Maybe the official scenery is too detailed for your slow machine, and you'd like to build terrain using a digital elevation model (DEM) with poorer resolution, to decrease the number of polygons and thus improve your framerates. Or maybe you've got a fantastically fast machine, and you want to build your own terrain using higher-resultion vector data (vmap1, Tiger) to get better roads/streams. For all these reasons, learning how to use TerraGear is a good idea. | For a variety of reasons, you might want to build terrain yourself, rather than downloading it from the available scenery on FlightGear. For instance, if you use [http://taxidraw.sourceforge.net/ TaxiDraw] to modify/improve information about an airport's taxiway/apron layout, you might wish to see how that modified airport would look in the scenery before deciding you're happy with the results. And normally to see and use the airport in the scenery, it's necessary to [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/#Updates submit the changes to Robin Peel], have him sign off on the changes, have the changes appear in the next [http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp/ official apt.dat], and then wait for the next [http://www.flightgear.org/Downloads/scenery.html official FlightGear scenery] build; if you can build terrain yourself, you can start using it right away. Maybe the official scenery is too detailed for your slow machine, and you'd like to build terrain using a digital elevation model (DEM) with poorer resolution, to decrease the number of polygons and thus improve your framerates. Or maybe you've got a fantastically fast machine, and you want to build your own terrain using higher-resultion vector data (vmap1, Tiger) to get better roads/streams. For all these reasons, learning how to use TerraGear is a good idea. | ||