Re: [Flightgear-devel] Regional textures merge request

[Stuart B. <stu...@gm...>]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:45 AM,  Yves wrote:
> The GIS shapefile might be easy, but this will first need some new sg/fg
> and probably terragear code for such "meta coverage". And more proposals,
> ideas and some kind of a scenery "master plan".

Using a GIS shapefile would simply be a case of some changes to simgear,
materials.xml and a small shapefile checked into fgdata.

I envisage something like the following syntax in the materials.xml file:

<shapefile>world.shp</shapefile>
<region>NorthernEurope</region>

Simgear would simply check whether the tile lies within a polygon labeled
with "NorthernEurope" in world.shp.

Those developing regional texturing would need to use a simple shapefile
editor (say QGIS) to draw a polygon that bounds the region for the material.
In fact, we'd probably just need one shapefile defining the
significant landmasses
(Caribbean, Pacific, Northern Europe, Equatorial Africa).

As Thorsten has already pointed out, this is really orthogonal to custom/world
scenery,  and is really about providing alternative ways to render the scenery
data.

I can understand your concern about increased texture sizes.  Reducing
the size of some of the regional textures is on my TODO list. I've avoided doing
so thus far, as I wanted to fix the tiling at maximum resolution.

-Stuart