Earthview: Difference between revisions

Technically, Earth is rendered as a ~58 km sized sphere positioned 1/100 of the actual altitude away from the spacecraft. It's position is constantly adjusted to give the same visual size using ray optics equations, and its attitude is rotated to place you 'above' the correct latitude and longitude. For 100 km altitude, the camera is thus actually just 1000 m away from the sphere.

Compared to almost anything else, the performance impact of re-positioning the sphere every frame is minimal.

The reason is that graphics cards operate with floating point precision, and a sphere with the real size of Earth would create (potentially architecture dependent) massive numerical problems (the default far plane clipping distance in FG is some 120.000 m). The same is in fact true for the skydome - it's actually a half dome some 20 km away from the camera, made to appear behind everything else by rendering magic. Or, in other word, we can't simply render a 'real earth' and a 'real atmosphere' because that would potentially overtax the GPU - real time rendering is always trickery of some sort.

The implementation has the negative consequence that you may not move the view point too far from the spacecraft (the ray optics illusion works for one object, but not for two simultaneously) - in particular flyby view or tower view will give you odd results with Earthview.

The real terrain engine is not technically switched off, but (assuming normal visibility settings) the terrain mesh is just too far to trigger either tile loading or rendering - as you get back from orbit, the terrain will load underneath Earthview, and if you end it at a reasonable altitude (say between 80.000 and 120.000 ft) you can go right back to the native FG terrain with minimum fuss.