Re: [Flightgear-devel] Next, for development (and not much else)

[Fernando G. L. <fer...@gm...>]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 9:32 PM James Turner <ja...@fl...> wrote:
> BTW, Fernando, we need to have a chat about that, to also fix the OSG 3.4.2 text-animation stuff: I think we need to find a way to support Effects in an OSG text shader, which … will be exciting.
>
> Anyway, at some point let’s have a proper discussion about ways to solve this, so we have a migration approach for text animations.

I've been investigating this for a while now and it has proven to be a
lot less trivial that I initially thought. My first approach was to
just transform the osgTexts into EffectGeodes, but this isn't so
elegant as the general rules of effects don't apply to animations (we
can't use <inherits-from>, model-default doesn't get applied
automatically as it isn't considered a model, etc).

Richard said on Discord that another option was creating a Canvas for
each text animation, but creating a FBO for every small piece of text
doesn't sound very performance-friendly. This is also worsened by the
fact that canvas cameras are scene-graph level cameras and are being
rendered multiple times (once per viewer slave camera).

Indeed this will be "exciting". :)

Fernando