Next Generation Scenery

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Revision as of 12:49, 4 November 2007 by MILSTD (talk | contribs) (adding items from mailing list discussions)
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These are some ideas for new scenery and new scenery engine for FlightGear.

Why?

We want more detailed scenery that's visible farther away, for a better VFR experience all around. Specifically, more detail makes the near-ground experience more realistic, especially for helicopter flight; scenery that truly extends to the visible horizon would make high-altitude flight more interesting. In addition, it's fun to fly around a richly detailed world.

Ideas

  • Ability to cut in polygon models of airports.
  • Ability to page terrain / textures so continuous flights around the world are still possible.
  • Ability to populate the world with arbitrary additional 3d objects. Note that our current ability to populate the world with random objects would not work with the new scheme. We'd need to completely overhaul that functionality to work in a photo texture drapped, LOD terrain world.
  • Care should be taken with object vertical placement so the terrain LOD doesn't move the 3d objects up and down noticable. And also so it doesn't noticably bury objects or float objects when the terrain LOD changes.
  • I assume all the current 2d polygon data would go away since this would be better represented by the photo texture overlay anyway.
  • LOD algorithm/system (with adjustable radius for high and low end users) The current irregular grid mesh works but it's not very efficient and we could get much better framerates with a nice LOD system. Alternatively much higher elevation resolution with similar framerates.
  • Texture overlays - FG scenery engine does the chopping and texture co-ord generation. (I won't go into details but this would greatly simplify LOD algorithms)

Related mailing list discussions

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