Implementing new features for FlightGear: Difference between revisions

Assume you have this interesting feature in mind which is not in FG. Chances are, you assume that just nobody thought about having it before. Chances are however that this assumption is wrong (a rough estimate would be that perhaps 5% of the suggestions are of that type). People working e.g. with shader effects have spent thousands of hours working with rendering code and usually have a habit of comparing nature and FG to see how to improve things. They also know what other games do and have read books and tutorials on GLSL shaders. So what's the case most of the time is that if a feature is not there, it failed a cost-benefit analysis - either it's not interesting enough so that it's low on a to-do list, or it would cost too much framerate to implement it, or too much coding time. If it'd be interesting and easy to do over the weekend, someone would have done it already. As a result, the reaction to simply suggesting the feature will be along 'Oh yeah, though about this a while ago, not so interesting...' So if you want to change this, you have to understand and change the cost-benefit analysis.