Re: [Flightgear-devel] Wow...nice clouds

[Mally <ma...@tk...>]

> I'd figure out how Micros~1 makes these clouds look so good:
>   http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/notams01/fs2002-1.htm

Can I beg to be unimpressed?  Until we start getting the visual appearance
to the level currently being achieved by Terragen (see
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/images.shtml or
http://home.iprimus.com.au/degsy/) AND we can see the clouds being blown by
the winds AND we can see them changing shape (as they do), then it still
takes a mental act of faith to convince yourself that these are 'real'
clouds, and we're just discussing the degree to which the rendition
approaches a static photographic image of a cloud.

The scenario I'm imagining is some way off in the future, and probably won't
happen without real-time dedicated hardware support.  This will probably
come from the graphics card manufacturer(s), or maybe there'll be a niche
for a new genre of add on card helping to create the artifacts and
behaviours of real time scenery including water, lighting, terrain and
textures as well as cloud.

Ultimately, I think simulators will end up specifying cloud parameters to a
hardware device and asking it to render the clouds in real time with real
time shape/texture changes and movement.  The hardware device will also
handle the resulting lighting effects.  Similarly, hardware devices will
probably also end up generating terrain detail and texture (a la Terragen)
in response to specified terrain parameters.  Ditto water, which from below
5000 feet or so is probably the most miserably unrealistic visual aspect of
flight simulators today.  This doesn't affect the flying itself unless you
happen to be modelling a float-plane or WIG (Wing In Ground Effect) craft,
in which case the sea dynamics and sea state take on a critical importance.

Someone posted an article on flightsim.com recently saying that there seems
to a great emphasis on beautifying the scenery without addressing the fact
that an aeroplane flies in a dynamic, constantly changing medium, and that
this aspect is being seriously neglected at the moment.  Improving the
atmospheric modelling (or improving the way atmospheric information is
received in real-time and used in the sim) will go some way to start
addressing this issue, beautifying the current genre of static clouds will
not.

I don't think Microsoft-envy is a good thing.  It's better to think beyond
that to a vision of the real future of flight simulation. Apologies as
always for the fact that I'm talking out of my hat and not actually
volunteering to do anything specific, and I'd be the last person to object
to any improvement in the visual appearance of clouds in any sim (I love
'em), but I feel quite strongly that there's a long way to go in this area,
and merely improving the static visual appearance of clouds may well
ultimately be a branch-line in the future history of flight simulation.

Mally