Next Generation Scenery

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Revision as of 14:38, 30 October 2008 by MILSTD (talk | contribs) (more corrections)
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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.

Disclaimer

  • Most of these items have been collected from various places without any deeper evaluation. Thus, they mostly represent various ideas/wishes of FlightGear users and contributors without any warranty about a) making sense in the given context nor b) aligning with the plans of those who are actually driving FlightGear's Scenery development. So, read this with a grain of salt ....

Ideas

  • ability to dynamically enable/disable certain scenery features ([1])
  • Provide the foundation to eventually facilitate runtime-based creation of airport features (i.e. runways and taxiways), so that changes to the underlying data files (apt.dat.gz) could be immediately honored at runtime without having to recompile scenery tiles
  • Ability to cut in polygon models of airports. [2]
  • 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)
  • The ability to drape the textures at differing resolutions at different locations in the scenery. (ie. higher res data immediately adjacent to airports where the pilot is generally closer to the ground and to give good definition on final approach).
  • Some sort of fix or workaround for the stretched-textures-on-cliff faces problem that draped textures suffer from in mountainous regions - possibly the ability to cut in textured polygons on steep faces.

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