FlightGear Newsletter April 2021: Difference between revisions

</gallery>Release builds now include {{Wikipedia|Appimage}} for Linux. See this discussion of [[Hardware recommendations#Recommendations for FlightGear in 2021 .282020.3 LTS.29|hardware recommendations]] for modern FlightGear - although it is for 2018.3 LTS and doesn't cover the new experimental OSM2City (see the OSM2City page info for perfromance tips).

Please report bugs and issues via the sourceforge tickets system if you come across any on the next branch, or LTS.

Fernando has been experimenting with adding new rendering features, using the capabilities of the [[Compositor]] - new [[HDR Pipeline|pipeline]] page. The work is "''*very*'' ''experimental''", as Fernando said. It has not been released on next as of writing - although a ''very limited'' prototype is intended to be added to FlightGear next branch. The new renderers will assume a higher version of OpenGL, which is one of the many big projects that are being worked on,

The Compositor is a framework to define rendering pipelines - so far the work has been to port the ALS renderer to the new framework and add the distinguishing features of the old unmaintained Rembrandt renderer like shadows and environmental light definitions without being slow. The idea is to port existing features to ensure everything works - the next preview release or LTS will transition to the Compositor. The new work builds on top. It investigates changing the physical model of aircraft surfaces (to something involving a version of PBR), adding lighting of surfaces from light bouncing off surrounding surfaces including real-time reflections, and implementing a new way of doing HDR algorithm using the new physically based surface model. Some tunable artistic glow (know as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(shader_effect) bloom]) is also supported. The new pipeline is built on top of existing work, and will use the fast shadows and lights added to the ALS port. Fernando hasn't found a way to re-use occlusion data (finding what is visible in the view and what isn't, and culling invisible geometry) between passes in current Open Scene Graph (OSG), so he is using a deferred rendering approach in the prototypeto overcome this OSG limitation - it means that anti-aliasing is restricted to post-processing that looks at the rendered image and tries to detect edges and blur them to remove jagged lines.

The current plan is to support {{Wikipedia|GlTF|GlTF}} (Graphics Language Transmission Format) as an alternative for 3d models in future - it supports the new surface model. This format supports binary data (GLB file extension), and these will be smaller than AC files.

As Fernando said, this is all very WiP and experimental, and an investigation of various options like a lot of development. Plans can change. There is no timeline, and progress can vary based on availability of volunteers.  

=== Space Shuttle ===

Copy & Paste from: https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37266972/