Re: [Flightgear-devel] The next FlightGear release (summer 2012)

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

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Gijs de Rooy wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> Calling something a major release is not just a matter of "what's possible",
> but also "what's done".
>
> There's a lot possible with Rembrandt, but 99% of our aircraft don't use it.
> And lots of aircraft look ugly with Rembrandt
> (non-translucent windows and fake shadows mostly). I just checked the few
> aircraft that I remember being included in the base
> package: only one has Rembrandt lights (c172p)!

A very good point, and one I hadn't considered in depth.

> I'm afraid we will get a forum-tsunami when we promote this release with
> "support for real time generated shadows and lights",
> if even the majority of the base package's aircraft aren't showing how nice
> it can look...

Rembrandt has been around for quite a few months now,
and the changes required to make an aircraft Rembrandt-compatible are
pretty small, even if the changes to add proper lights are more involved.

If I was being harsh I'd suggest that the aircraft maintainers should
"man up and do it".
There's still plenty of time before the release...

> On our IRC channel, someone brought up the idea of including Rembrandt in
> the release, but not mentioning it (explicitly) in
> the changelog/press-release; and thus versioning it 2.8.0. That'll keep the
> expectations low, and allow aircraft developers to
> spend some months (till the next release) on getting their aircraft
> Rembrandt-ready. As we don't update the aircraft downloads
> in-between releases, users need to wait till the next release anyway before
> they can download a fair number of Rembrandt-ready
> aircraft...

You make a very good argument for 2.8.0 rather than 3.0.0.

I think we should still mention Rembrand in the release note.  I think it's
perfectly reasonable to talk about it as a development feature that has still
to be supported by all aircraft and shaders.

I really don't like the idea of not including it in the changelog.
After all, we want
people to become excited by it and update aircraft/shaders etc.

> The next release could then be called 3.0.0. This would be in line with the
> Plib-OSG switch. The OSG transition started with 1.9.0.
> That release was a "step back", as we lost shadows, 3D clouds etc. The
> period thereafter was spent on bringing back some of the
> features (eg. 3D clouds) and allowed developers to get used to the new
> possibilities (shaders). FlightGear 2.0.0 was then released
> with the key-sentence: "FlightGear 2.0.0 reflects the maturation of the
> OpenSceneGraph".

I'm not sure that is correct, but my memory is dim.  My recollection was that
even after we converted the main cvs branch to OSG, we kept a plib branch
that was used for a subsequent release.

-Stuart