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(posting to docs: http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=18935&p=175733#p175714) |
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[[File:Random-buildings.jpg|thumb|Random Buildings]] | [[File:Random-buildings.jpg|thumb|Random Buildings]] | ||
As of 05/2012, FlightGear | The old urban effect, even at minimum quality level, does a lot of texture reading. It needs to iteratively compute the intersection point of your view line with the heightmap, and so needs to read the heightmap quite a lot (if I remember correctly, it might need to read it up to 20 times - most 'normal' shaders read perhaps 1-5 textures). Texture read operations are generically expensive, more so on less powerful hardware. | ||
So the urban effect has quite different demands on the GPU than other effects, and there is no reason it should scale like other effects - it is quite possible that it simply doesn't run fast enough on your machine. The urban effect is really a visual hack anyway, we'd strongly suggest leaving it off and using the new 'random buildings' feature instead, as described below: | |||
As of 05/2012, FlightGear supports a new "random buildings" feature, buildings are generated at runtime and placed in Urban and Town areas. In v2.8.0 these take up a lot of memory, but in subsequent releases this has been improved significantly. | |||
Building generation is configurable through materials.xml, and documented in [http://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/blobs/master/Docs/README.materials $FG_ROOT/Docs/README.materials ]. It is designed to be flexible enough that we can have different types of cities in Europe compared with the USA, or Africa. The current texture used for the buildings is a proof of concept, and we are looking for people with artistic abilities to contribute improved textures. If anyone is interested in creating a better texture, please get in touch with [[User:Stuart]] on the mailing list or forums. | Building generation is configurable through materials.xml, and documented in [http://gitorious.org/fg/fgdata/blobs/master/Docs/README.materials $FG_ROOT/Docs/README.materials ]. It is designed to be flexible enough that we can have different types of cities in Europe compared with the USA, or Africa. The current texture used for the buildings is a proof of concept, and we are looking for people with artistic abilities to contribute improved textures. If anyone is interested in creating a better texture, please get in touch with [[User:Stuart]] on the mailing list or forums. |