From: Curtis O. <cur...@gm...> - 2007-12-03 13:32:47
|
On Dec 3, 2007 6:23 AM, STenyaK (Bruno Gonzalez) <> wrote: > I'm not sure what "FDM" means, couldnt' find a good explanation. FDM is the acronym we use for "flight dynamics model". Conceptually, a "physics engine" engine covers much of the same ground. If I were to get really nitpicky, perhaps I could say that the flight dynamics model contains a physics engine + additional speciallized code to model the dynamics of flight. It looks like it's what i call a "physics engine". Are there any existing > examples of several FDMs interacting with each other? Planes colliding > with other planes, or their turbulences affecting the other, etc.? So far in the flightgear project we have not addressed aircraft/vehicles affecting each other. Our philosophy is that we are modeling a friendly airspace so collisions with other aircraft should never ... at least for those that take their simming seriously and start somewhere other than the default location. It would be interesting to model turbulence affects from one aircraft/vehicle onto another, but to do this in a generic and physically correct way, might be far beyond the scope of what we can accomplish with finite compute power. Maybe we could build in some interesting heuristics/hacks though that could be fun. In the world of aviation we have wake turbulence, formation flying (and air to air refueling, aero towing, etc.) An FDM that uses Motorsport physics could be easily created, but the > interaction between several FDMs is another issue... The FlightGear "FDM" interface was originally designed so it is relatively straight forward to drop in another "physics engine." (sorry to mix terms there.) :-) > I'm still not sure if that kind of features would be included in the > Motorsport core, or provided by a third party program (such as FG), > we're still in the design stages of the project. I've always thought it would be fun to wind through an interesting mountain region for a hundred miles or so of realistic roadway with real terrain, etc. The driving sims I've seen have either stuck with specific race tracks or very small areas with lots of detail, or larger areas with very sparse detail. Algorithmically it would be possible to create large areas with pretty nice detail. I've been dabbling in some of that recently, but it's really hard stuff. Intersections are hard to deal with, the complexity and polygon count of detailed roadways are hard to handle, and creating realistic surfaces from noisy SRTM data is also a difficult thing to do. But there are some tantalizing ideas that wouldn't be all that hard. If you added some attributes to your road data base, you could start dropping in things like mile markers, street lights, other regularly spaced signs, mail boxes, guard rails, jerzey barrier. My problem is that I have way more good ideas than I have time. Well at least I think they are good ideas. :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d |