Random Buildings: Difference between revisions

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posting to docs: http://flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=18935&p=175733#p175714
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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 support "random buildings", which 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.
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.  

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