RE: [Flightgear-devel] 3D modeling, animation, and rendering system

[Norman V. <nh...@ca...>]

Wolfram Kuss writes:
>>
>Curt, John Tsao or anybody else:
>Would it make sense to have PLIB read and write fgfs scenery?
>Would this be needed to import MSFS scenery into fgfs?

Yes

>If I understand correctly there is the old, ascii format that for
>example the Delphi SceneryEditor uses and the new binary one.
>Can we convert between them? 

>Would it be sufficient if PLIB handles
>the ascii format? That seems fairly easy.

Yes this would be sufficient FGFS can read the ASCII format
there are conversion routines in SImGear

The biggest problem has been getting the FGFS material library
concept translated into PPE.  

< I think Joel can be persuaded to use the FGFS way on this now >

Also note that PPE can read the SSG scenegraph directly from a 
running FGFS session

by using something like the following instead of the main()
in ppe.cxx to start up PPE as a separate window inside FGFS

< add this to the general FGFS initializations in main() >

void ppe_init ( int argc, char **argv )
{
  if( PPE_MainGroup == NULL ) {
	printf("Making PPE_MainGroup\n");
	PPE_MainGroup =  new AppPluginBase(0,0,0,0);
	curr_gui      =  new ppeMainMenu(0,0,0,0);
	PPE_MainGroup -> add(curr_gui);

	curr_gui->end();
	curr_gui->show();

	init_python ( argc, argv ) ;
  }
}

Then you can pause FGFS and just the SSG pointers to PPE
and you have whatever root points to inside of a PPE session

root does not necessaily have to be the top level node

int ppe ( ssgContext *ssg, ssgRoot *root )
{
	ModelGroup  *curr_group;
	printf("Calling load_database\n");
	curr_viewer->init();
	curr_viewer->new_database();
	curr_viewer->draw();
	curr_viewer -> setContext( ssg );
	curr_group = curr_viewer->get_gui()->getModelGroup();
	curr_group->getModel()->setSceneRoot(root);

/////  Rest of normal PPE main_loop here

// return control to FGFS when done editing
}

Cheers

Norman