[Flightgear-devel] Generating ground textures on the fly?

[Thomas A. <ra...@we...>]

I've been playing with populating my home airport's area with buildings derived from OSM floorplan data. I think having many buildings in the correct place greatly improves realism over the current random buildings/sparse static models, especially when you know the area.

However, now the buildings obviously don't match with ground textures or random trees. Any bright ideas how to achieve this? I know I could follow the photoscenery approach and pre-render special materials and masks for a couple of cities, but that just doesn't scale.

I wonder how x-plane 10 does this? Could we generate the texture on the fly? Based on landclass and road data? I could see a number of advantages/disadvantages here as compared to our current, generic textures:
+ much better autogen scenery possible: many textured streets/railroads without additional scenery vertices
+ shared models with an individual piece of ground texture
+ get rid of sharp landclass borders
+ possibly improved resolution
- eats much more video ram and CPU (but then I have 3 out of 4 idle cores ATM)
- probably totally incompatible with the current terragear toolchain

I know C/C++ and would be happy to start tinkering with this part at some point. But I know next to nothing about OSG, OpenGL, and shaders. Graphics gurus: is there any better way to do this?

Cheers,
Tom