Re: [Flightgear-devel] Next FlightGear release (Feb. 17 2013)

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

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Thorsten Renk wrote:
> - hires world scenery
> -> no idea, but doesn't seem to be coming any time soon...

Could someone point me at the current status of this please?  I know there
was some group discussion and an IRC chat session a couple of months ago.

- rain bug
> -> that still persists, rain is broken in Advanced Weather since currently
> setting the rain norm doesn't necessarily generate rain as the underlying
> system tries to be smart and parses the cloud layer altitude of Basic
> Weather - which is zero in Advanced Weather. Can anyone help here? I think
> this can be fixed before the release.
>

I'll take a look at this - it's been on my TODO list for a while.

I vaguely recall that we already have a property to disable some other
weather logic that might be appropriate to key off.  If you happen to know
what it is, it'll save me some searching.


> * rendering-related
> 'Make effects work across different rendering schemes, support atmospheric
> light scattering in Rembrandt'
>

Personally I'd really like to see the rendering systems unified, even
though I don't have enough GPU to run them both together (or indeed
Rembrandt with shadows).  It's just make for a more consistent experience.


> - atmospheric light scattering in Rembrandt
> -> I haven't been looking much into Rembrandt, since it turns out too slow
> on my current computer. Last Friday I got myself a new Qosmio X870 - if any
> currently existing laptop can run Advanced Weather, Rembrandt and
> Atmospheric Light Scattering together, than probably it's that one or a
> similar model. So I have now the means to attack the problem.
>

That's excellent news.  I had a look at this a couple of weeks ago but
didn't get anywhere significant as I didn't know whether the atmospheric
scattering should be added to the fog pass or not.


> On a personal note though, admittedly I get increasingly tired after more
> than a year of shader work, and I would like to do so many other things,
> like tinker a bit with the weather and do more regional texturing schemes,
> it's just so frustrating to ask questions, read stuff, try to figure out
> how things are done to run right into another unexpected roadblock like the
> z-Buffer issue for clouds and the terrain, or the near/far camera problem
> and watch another week of work go down the drain again. Or to sit a week
> trying to optimize shader code to hear offhand comments like 'this really
> needs to be optimized, since it runs so slow and on my computer I can run
> <insert name of 3d game here> without problems, so it can't be my
> hardware'. So I don't know how much longer I will be working on rendering
> schemes.
>

I can appreciate that - and indeed find that taking a break to work on
another project often helps.  Of course, I then get sucked back in by "I
wonder if..."



> All in all, for my part it seems rather a 2.10 than a 3.0 - some of the
> things which I'd like to see in 3.0 are done, but the majority isn't yet.
>

+1

-Stuart