Re: [Flightgear-devel] Patch v5 - Rain & Snow

[Curtis O. <cur...@gm...>]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Nicolas wrote:

> With OSG precipitation, I can't get in the same time snow and rain...
>
> No, there isn't factor in the motion of the aircraft...  We can work to
> improve this.
>
> The origin and the wind have to be tested... and maybe adapted.


Hi Nicolas,

If I look very close with both snow and rain, I can now see that the
aircraft motion through the falling particles seems to be correct ... it's
subtle and sometimes hard to see depending on the lighting and background
color ... and subtle is probably good for these effects.

I think what confused me was that even at flying speeds, there is still a
downward elongation of the particles with rain which tricks my brain into
thinking they are falling straight down.  If the streaking could be made
opposite the direction of motion some how (???) I think that may make the
visual effect more compelling.  I'm not sure if that makes any sense?

But the overall effect of the snow and the rain is quite good.  Also, you
work to tie this into the metar reports is also very nice.  Question: is it
possible to tune the amount of snow/rain?  Perhaps a future update would be
to ease slowly into snow/rain rather than make an abrupt change (if that is
possible to do.)

I think if we could redo the draw order (or change the near clip plane?) so
that precipitation doesn't appear to be inside the cockpit then I would be
happy to see this new effect get committed to cvs, and we can work on
refining some of the subtle perceptual details later.

Best regards,

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/