Re: [Plib-devel] ssg sky

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

"Curtis L. Olson" wrote:

> > I imagine we're going to need to think in terms of an auxiliary library:
> > XXX is to SSG as GLU is to GL...where 'XXX' is this new thing.
> 
> That's good news, I'm glad you are interested in doing something like
> this.  I see two levels of things that might be useful ... a library
> of routines to build primitive objects ... spheres, cones, boxes,
> etc.  Something analogous to GLU.

Yep.

> Vehicle dynamics will be one big issue on my plate.  It would be great
> to have something decent I could just use, but if not, I will make my
> best effort to contribute whatever I have to write myself.

I wasn't thinking of the full sophistication needed in a serious
simulation - just something quick and dirty to let potential game
developers get started quickly.

Something like the code that the SGI Performer library provides for
that kind of thing.
 
> For they sky, you need to feed in a top sky color and a horizon color.

Is the horizon directional?  When the sun sets (for example), the sunset
colour is most intense near to the point where the sun goes down.

> This could be calculated by time, or sun angle with the horizon, or
> you could just feed in random colors such as orange at the top and
> purple at the horizon.

MmmMmmmm - green and magenta skies.

> I know the resistance to introducing additional packages and
> dependencies, but somehow things that get into modeling of the real
> world seem to me to be beyond the scope of plib.

Yes - I think so.  It's not so much that it's beyond the scope as
that PLIB is meant for games where the restrictions implied by
modelling the real world are frequently unacceptable.
 
> There may be some current simgear dependencies, but perhaps with a bit
> of thought, most if not all of these could be removed.  The big one
> that comes to mind is I use flight gear's mac/pc/unix path
> generalization class ... but this could be eliminated and I could just
> require the caller to provide the appropriate complete path to the
> files needed (two textures and a star database.)

PLIB really needs a path generalization thingy - perhaps we should
just suck that into the package too.

However, for the textures you could just look in the ssg path or let
the application tell you where they are.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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