Board index Other Hangar talk

Help needed - market research for FG

Talk about (almost) anything, as long as it is no serious FlightGear talk and does not fit in the other subforums.
Forum rules
Please refrain from discussing politics.

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Thorsten » Sat Dec 15, 2012 8:27 am

Well, a centralized information document (wiki page; also containing a link to and note about the issue tracker) that states the forum handle of the person involved would fulfill both, wouldn't it?


Nobody is keeping you (or anyone else) from making that document (or any other you may find useful). Yet you don't seem to consider that possibility - I'm curious, why?

I mean, how it looks from my side is that every few months or so I got told what else I should do in addition to what I'm already doing ('everyone really should have a better knowledge of GIT, some of the commits recently have a messed-up history', 'we really need better documentation, that's as important as coding', 'we need support for effect X in rendering framework Y', 'clouds should be transferable over MP',...). So if I start creating some document, all that will likely happen is that the next user doesn't find it, and simply goes posting a complaint in the forum.

If it's not acceptable to spend 10 minutes with the search function to find information, then the problem is that we generate too much information to make it accessible at once. You would like to have it structured one way, the next user would like it a different way, and I can spend all year trying to catch up without getting any work done.

With regard to dds:

My strong impression was that that discussion on the devel list has taken place and is concluded with the result that dds is to remain optional. Judging from screenshots, a minority of users uses the dds texture set, from developer side I'm only aware of Vivian and Emilian using dds, several ideas to convert other aircraft textures to dds have been called off after the Linux driver issues have been presented (for instance, for the F-16 this was considered, but as far as I know not done). So I don't see a chance that dds will become the default, nor do I personally think it's a good idea. I see the merit of dds primarily in special cases where custom mipmapping is needed, but the pricetag in terms of disk space usage and compatibility issues is pretty steep.
Thorsten
 
Posts: 12490
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:33 am

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Hooray » Sat Dec 15, 2012 11:58 am

Yes, gotta agree with Thorsten here. There's nothing stopping you from creating such a document. Just take a look at the "How the FlightGear project works" article, it also was just an idea based on discussions that Thorsten and I had a while back, so we gave it a shot - without any official/formal endorsement at all. In fact, when I sent a draft of it to Thorsten, he "politely disagreed" with the size of the article and instead wrote up a shorter version (see the forum posting).

Really, we were also just trying to improve the situation a little (and were not encouraged by anybody, I may add!). And it is good to know that this work actually helps people understand some issues better.
On the other hand, I have a personal tendency to use the wiki (or sticky forum posts) to optimize some of our more common discussions a little like this. Which is also why I tend to write tutorials/howtos rather than answering long postings here.

So please, do feel encouraged to contribute such a document. You are not any more or less part of this community that we are. And I promise to provide feedback and contribute my own changes to such a document. Eventually, it will probably be adopted by other contributors. That's how things usually work out here. :D
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Bjoern » Sat Dec 15, 2012 6:53 pm

i4dnf wrote in Sat Dec 15, 2012 6:16 am:There is a more viable solution by using libtxc_dxtn (provides mesa with the texture compression extensions), so you could hint at installing that, and probably an extra step of enabling texture compression in xorg.conf is needed (this varies with drivers, I'm not familiar with the exact steps).


That's a much better solution to the issue, thanks!



Thorsten wrote in Sat Dec 15, 2012 8:27 am:Nobody is keeping you (or anyone else) from making that document (or any other you may find useful). Yet you don't seem to consider that possibility - I'm curious, why?


What do you think will happen if I made a "Current short term goals" wiki page?

My money is on "wasted server space by stillborn wiki article", as I don't have any intentions for contribution to this page from active developers.

So if I start creating some document, all that will likely happen is that the next user doesn't find it, and simply goes posting a complaint in the forum.


You, Gijs or Stuart ahve the status for a successful kickoff of such a page, I, as nothing but a lowly Bash scripter with a few lenghty forum posts consisting of suggestions, haven't.

But as with all of my posts in this thread, this is just a suggestion. And suggestions are not binding in any way.

My strong impression was that that discussion on the devel list has taken place and is concluded with the result that dds is to remain optional. Judging from screenshots, a minority of users uses the dds texture set, from developer side I'm only aware of Vivian and Emilian using dds, several ideas to convert other aircraft textures to dds have been called off after the Linux driver issues have been presented (for instance, for the F-16 this was considered, but as far as I know not done). So I don't see a chance that dds will become the default, nor do I personally think it's a good idea. I see the merit of dds primarily in special cases where custom mipmapping is needed, but the pricetag in terms of disk space usage and compatibility issues is pretty steep.


Fair enough then.

For the very special cases, installing libtxc_dxtn might just suffice.
Bjoern
 
Posts: 484
Joined: Fri Jan 06, 2012 11:00 pm
Location: TXL (RIP)
Version: Next
OS: ArchLinux

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Hooray » Sat Dec 15, 2012 10:00 pm

Bjoern wrote in Sat Dec 15, 2012 6:53 pm:You, Gijs or Stuart ahve the status for a successful kickoff of such a page, I, as nothing but a lowly Bash scripter with a few lenghty forum posts consisting of suggestions, haven't.


See my earlier posting, but I think this is just plain wrong: Neither of us is any more or less "FlightGear" than you are.

The only difference may be a certain track record due to a history of project involvement and certain contributions in the past.
While you may think that exactly this is crucial, it really isn't: The FG wiki was contributed by someone who wasn't at all involved in the project previously (and who still doesn't show up regularly apparently), the issue tracker was set up by someone who didn't contribute to core development, and neither aircraft/scenery development.

And then, we have tons of popular articles in the wiki that were contributed by anonymous contributors who apparently left FG immediately afterwards. There are some pages and articles having more than 10k-100k views that were contributed by people who were obviously never involved in any way in the project.

Yes, personal networking and having a track record can definitely be helpful, but as long as a gap is filled and a need is satisfied, it doesn't seem to be all that important actually. Things are obviously very much different once you are trying to convince people to compete with existing resources and infrastructure. For example, think about how LONG it took for people to switch from cvs to git... or just look at the long overdue fgdata split process.
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby EigerSA » Sun Dec 16, 2012 7:39 am

or just look at the long overdue fgdata split process.


Where we would a good place to start in order to become really knowledgeable in FlightGear, particularly about what's happening now? For example, you mention the split process, is this discussed just on a mailing list? I really am curious. I'm more interested at this stage with the scenery since in my humble opinion it gives FlightGear so much depth in well developed parts, but where should I be looking at too what's happening in scenery now (from the development side) and what the plans are for the future?
EigerSA
 
Posts: 88
Joined: Thu Sep 08, 2011 7:26 pm
Location: Durban, South Africa
Callsign: EigerSA
OS: Vista

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Gijs » Sun Dec 16, 2012 10:18 am

Airports: EHAM, EHLE, KSFO
Aircraft: 747-400
User avatar
Gijs
Moderator
 
Posts: 9542
Joined: Tue Jul 03, 2007 3:55 pm
Location: Delft, the Netherlands
Callsign: PH-GYS
Version: Git
OS: Windows 10

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Thorsten » Sun Dec 16, 2012 12:23 pm

My money is on "wasted server space by stillborn wiki article", as I don't have any intentions for contribution to this page from active developers.


Apart from what I would define as my near term goals, I don't know so much definite either, so if I were to set up a wiki page I'd write several folks a PN or an email telling them about the page and asking them for their goals for the next 6 months, spend an hour browsing the newsletter and then distill the responses and the info into a summary.

You seem to assume I have all the info readily available, but I don't, since for instance I don't follow so much what is happening in the AI system - I just know whom to ask in case this'd ever be necessary. So, given some time spent asking questions, I see no reason why you should not be able to write a meaningful summary.

Where we would a good place to start in order to become really knowledgeable in FlightGear, particularly about what's happening now?


Definitely follow the devel list, otherwise go read newsletters, in case something interests you in more detail, go and write emails, ask questions - usualy people are quite happy to explain about their projects.
Thorsten
 
Posts: 12490
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:33 am

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Hooray » Sun Dec 16, 2012 12:58 pm

Where we would a good place to start in order to become really knowledgeable in FlightGear, particularly about what's happening now?


  • the developers mailing list
  • gitorious (merge requests)
  • the issue tracker (for reported bugs and new feature requests)
  • the wiki (newsletter, changelog - developer roadmaps)
  • the forums (look for postings made by core developers and other long-term contributors, basically people who have a track record of being DOERS in one way or another)
  • the IRC channel

Personal networking is a huge part of it, like Thorsten mentioned. There's tons of stuff happening "behind the scenes" through private communication via eMail/PM/IRC/IM etc

I really am curious. I'm more interested at this stage with the scenery since in my humble opinion it gives FlightGear so much depth in well developed parts, but where should I be looking at too what's happening in scenery now (from the development side) and what the plans are for the future?


  • Take a look at the forum postings/threads that the users psadro_gm and papillon81 have recently contributed to. They are the guys doing scenery core development
  • take a look at gitorious for related commits
  • check out the devel mailing list for TerraGear related discussions in 2011/2012

If you are just interested in scenery projects for different places like LOWI, the scenery sub forum and the wiki are excellent places to learn more
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby btw » Mon Dec 17, 2012 12:26 am

I haven't read through the thread so apologies in advance if these comments are repeats.

Flightgear is simply not user friendly ( a fundamental requirement of any good software). One of Flightgear's original selling points was supposed to be that it runs under Linux, this is true if and only if the end user is a Linux expert and in the habit of continuously upgrading to the most up to date release of their Linux package. I use Ubuntu 10.04 because of the long term commitment to support for this version, I have flightgear 2.4 and find now that most developments eg aircraft etc are not backward compatible, ie a330-200 series doesn't work and many other things, furthermore it seems that if I want flightgear 2.8 then I have to install Ubuntu 12.04, so why don't I just install windows and get FSX instead where everything works in detail.

The upshot is that Flightgear seems oriented towards the windows user where FSX is available, and Flightgear is simply not in the same league as FSX (yet), isn't this Flightgear shooting itself in the foot ? Some user friendly installation scripts for long term support releases of Linux ( like Ubuntu 10.04) should be a priority.
btw
 
Posts: 63
Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2011 9:53 pm

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Hooray » Mon Dec 17, 2012 12:41 am

Thanks for your feedback.

, I have flightgear 2.4 and find now that most developments eg aircraft etc are not backward compatible, ie a330-200 series doesn't work and many other things,

This is generally true, backward compatibility is not really a primary concern usually - which is largely because of the requirements involved here, i.e. regarding project coordination, planning - but also regarding the required manpower. So this is not easy to solve unfortunately.

furthermore it seems that if I want flightgear 2.8 then I have to install Ubuntu 12.04, so why don't I just install windows and get FSX instead where everything works in detail.

Actually, updating your distribution really should not be necessary at all.
I regularly run FG on really outdated distributions, but that obviously requires either building everything from source, or getting access to binary packages that match your libc version etc.

Improving linux support for people who are not able to build from source was recently discussed on the devel list: http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear- ... 38817.html

If you have ideas/suggestions on improving the situation, please feel free to post a feature request using the issue tracker: http://flightgear-bugs.googlecode.com/
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Thorsten » Mon Dec 17, 2012 8:42 am

I use Ubuntu 10.04 because of the long term commitment to support for this version, I have flightgear 2.4 and find now that most developments eg aircraft etc are not backward compatible, ie a330-200 series doesn't work and many other things


I don't think that's a particularly fair thing to ask, and I don't think you can run FSX airplanes on Microsoft FlightSim 8 (which is the proper comparison).

FG is (in a limited way) backward compatible in such that a 2.9 binary runs many airplanes which have been released with 2.4. What you're asking however is forward compatibility, i.e. a 2.4 binary should be able to run airplanes for future releases - and that's just impossible to do.

New airplanes rely on new features present in the binary - for example a lot of MFD and HUD technology is now being built around canvas. Cavas doen't exist in 2.4, so there is no way this can be supported properly, even if we wanted to. If you have 2.4, you'll need to use airplanes released for 2.4.

One of Flightgear's original selling points was supposed to be that it runs under Linux, this is true if and only if the end user is a Linux expert and in the habit of continuously upgrading to the most up to date release of their Linux package.


Not true, I've been running FG versions from 0.91 to 2.9 on a really outdated Fedora Core 9 distribution. In some cases I compiled myself, but up to 2.0 I always upgraded based on released binaries.

furthermore it seems that if I want flightgear 2.8 then I have to install Ubuntu 12.04, so why don't I just install windows and get FSX instead where everything works in detail.


Because of the 500$ pricetag a windows version + FSX + addons costs? I'm sure if you offer 500$ here in the forum, you'll find someone who installs you FG2.8 on your current Ubuntu version. But you wouldn't consider that, right, because FG is free - and yet it's so easy to compare to a commercial product...
Thorsten
 
Posts: 12490
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:33 am

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby gluon » Mon Dec 17, 2012 10:54 am

Thanks for all the replies. Sure took me while to read through this. I have the impression the discussion has become a little off-topic lately...

Gijs wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 3:44 pm: Autohide of the menubar is disabled by default.

Alright, all the better. :) It was activated here when I installed FlightGear on a fresh OS install aut of the OpenSuse Game Repo. So, apparently they ship it that way.

Hooray wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 3:53 pm: However, regarding DDS textures and other "high-end eye candy" features it's worth keeping in mind, that not all new FG users will have access to the latest hardware ...

It's clear that starting with high-demanding defaults isn't the way to go and the default settings are high enough already.
I think moving some settings to the GUI is a good idea (which has been performed as part of the usability enhancements this year) as long as they are well structured and presented ergonomically. X-Plane's settings are powerful, but a disaster in this regard. Too many settings at once. The improved weather UI in 2.9 is a good example of how other settings could be presented. Personally, I like the way the UI has been improved during the last releases.

Thorsten wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:09 pm:Opinions are divided on the issue of the well-matchedness of the DDS texture set :-) Also, the higher resolution comes at the price of increased tiling problems ...

Yes, there are some issues with the DDS texture set, neither is the default set perfect. It also depends what you mean with matched. Tiling/repetitiveness isn't that bad IMHO. Not any worse than in the default set.

Thorsten wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 8:09 pm:We do in fact have now the regional texture set as default, which is, as the name indicates, even regionally matchable, and for which I spend a lot of time blending textures correctly - so I would appreciate any more specific mismatch complaints, because we can really fix them locally and make a city in Asia look different from a city in the US.

Really? Hmm, well I must say I haven't noticed the change to the regional textures ( 2.8 ). At least in the default area, probably because there the old default texture set is still pretty much untouched. I'm not aware if anyone has been doing work to improve the look of the surroundings of FlightGears default airport KSFO, but if I had one area to name it would be San Fransisco Bay.

As for the areas that you have changed and I've checked I agree that they are indeed well matched, but still can be improved. The specific problem I have with the current set is many of its textures have a low resolution to begin with which is spread over a larger area. This reduces the effective resolution even more. There are other issues but I will not go into details because they are pointless to the original topic. [But actually I shouldn't complain about that texture set, since I've contributed some of those textures myself :]

The only point I was trying to make was that a better default set would strongly contribute to a good first-time impression. Which also goes along the lines of this statement:
Thorsten wrote in Tue Nov 13, 2012 1:30 pm:My particular problem is - I know how to make Flightgear look good and to make the advertising screenshots. But that helps only so much, because if user X then has a look and find it doesn't regularly look like that, he's disappointed.


Bjoern wrote in Tue Dec 11, 2012 6:02 pm:Quality sounds are hard to come by. ... It gets even more difficult when the sounds have to be licensed under the GPL to be included in FG.

Yes and no. The Socata Rallye MS893E is an example of a very well sounding plane in FG (the current GIT version uses stereo-files which are no longer supported unfortunately). Also, the sounds of the Dromader were recorded by an enthusiast right off the real plane. Of course these are exceptions, but it shows what's possible. In addition, there was a forum post and/or a discussion on the mailing-list some time back where a professional sound engineer offered a large amount of sound samples from airports. But nobody took the offering. So there are possibilities, it's just the usual lack of resources.

Bjoern wrote in Tue Dec 11, 2012 6:02 pm:Also, unless you've got perfectly calm lake areas like Crater Lake, you won't see many reflections anyway.
There could be a function which enables reflections on inland water areas (lakes) when the wind is below a certain speed, however.

After looking at pictures of ocean scenes, I agree somewhat. There are some reflections of clouds however. For inland water its a different matter.

EigerSA wrote in Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:31 pm:After this statement, I certainly feel like I'm wasting my time with FlightGear. It's a pity.

No your not. You are improving something to enhance your personal enjoyment. And if you share and contribute this, it will benefit others, too.
Compare this to commercial sims where you cannot contribute and after a version change all of your efforts are in vain (-> the original motivation why FlightGear was created).

I just hope that more people contribute their custom aircraft and scenery (shape files) to the central repositories. Currently, I get the impression many good potential contributions are lost in private hangars. :(

Philosopher wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 4:59 pm:I'm not quite getting the Cessna thing? Why would we have it be started automatically on start up?

Well, is it realistic to be standing with engines off and in parking configuration on a runway? In reality it takes some minutes to get an aircraft running and warmed up. Imagine that happening on a heavily frequented airport like Atlanta or Chicago. Personally, I don't object to having to start an aircraft before using it. However, let this then be the case on a parking position and not on the runway.

The point about the F14 was, that the default fuel configuration isn't very reasonable (empty tanks) - at least from a first-time users perspective. There is a dialog for fueling around which let's you control all of the payload parameters. But I myself was clueless about what to do and only stumbled over the fueling dialog while "searching for the error".

So what I was actually trying to convey was that the default aircraft could be set up with default settings so that they are usable without too much fiddeling.

Philosopher wrote in Mon Dec 10, 2012 4:59 pm:Point is this: it's the user's fault if they can't start a piston engine!

Many of the replies have reminded me of this article I recently stumbled upon (also take a look at the comments) ;-) http://www.itworld.com/it-management/32 ... themselves

I agree that there is value in knowing how to start a piston engine or even knowing the procedure to a start a more complex machine. For serious sim-fans this is part of the fun.
The question is if the current scenario is demotivating to people new to FlightGear. From comments in the web (av forums, download sites, magazines) I take that this is really an issue for some people.
A contributing factor is that indeed many complain that they don't know how to find documentation, such as the manual. Or they can't find a suitable translations.

If anyone is interested in determining what's keeping people from adapting, then I'd recommend doing some market research in the web and especially flight sim forums. Hooray is right about also opening a thread in one of them to get first hand comments. To some extend everyone here is somewhat biased towards FlightGear :)

At the end of the day, it all boils down to the question which target audience FlightGear should be promoted towards.
If you are looking at more sophisticated flight-sim enthusiasts then an important factor is realism. This target group would also be most likely to contribute. However, realism includes, amongst others, visual appearance (scenery, aircraft), sounds as well as acurate FDM and systems modeling. In this field add-on companies already provide extensively modeled aircraft and scenery for commercial sims. Obviously, they have the resources and possibilities which go beyond what anyone could provide for comparable counterparts within FlightGear. So the question is what FlightGear has to offer in this realm setting it appart distinctively from FSX and motivating enough for them to switch.

By the way there's already a page in the wiki with FlightGears unique Features and everyone is invited to add a few points:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Unique_Features
gluon
 
Posts: 68
Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 8:43 am

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby Thorsten » Mon Dec 17, 2012 12:49 pm

A somewhat off-topic excursion into the backgrounds of texturing schemes:

I'm not aware if anyone has been doing work to improve the look of the surroundings of FlightGears default airport KSFO, but if I had one area to name it would be San Fransisco Bay.


I've been to the bay area once in real life, and from my memory, the default texturing scheme gave a decent account here. There are no major clashes I'm aware of, and that's much more than can be said for other areas of the world. It's a good idea to regionalize that since it's sort of a showcase for FG, but admittedly I don't find it interesting enough to do it myself.

As for well-matchedness of the dds textures, they seem to be optimized for European use. Look at Hawaii (since I have most of the comparison ready):

West Maui for real:

Image

West Maui in default texture scheme:

Image

Well, we do get the overall color balance wrong, but what gets often overlooked is that this is a texture scheme which really does the whole world - so it will never be spectacular anywhere. What is not appreciated is that it also doesn't get major clashes, unrealistic contrasts, ...

West Maui in dds texture scheme:

Image

Now we're getting more than just the color balance wrong - we're getting harsh contrasts between the rather bright fields and the deep green shrubland and the European-style agriculture really looks wrong here.

The dds basically makes a bet - it has many textures with deeper and more intense colors and commits to a particular style of agriculture - where that bet works out, dds looks more spectacular, but where that bet doesn't work out, the dds set fails really spectacular.

(I'm not posting the regionalized comparison here because that would be an unfair comparison).

Auyantepui (South America) is a really spectacular failure

For real:

Image

And in dds:

Image

My point not being that the dds set is worse. But it's not unconditionally better matched, in many areas of the world the unambitious, low contrast, a bit dull default texture scheme does a mediocre job but hides flaws in the landcover data whereas the high-contrast, more spectacular dds set highlights the same flaws and draws attention to them. I think you may be underestimating the virtue of a texture set which sort of works almost everywhere, even if it's never really right.

As for resolution, the default textures are I think usually 512x512 spread to 2000 x 2000 m, which gives a pixel size of 4x4 m. I'm not sure how large the dds base size is - probably similar. They're mapped to a variety of sizes, but 1000 x 1000 m seems the usual. Which gives a pixel size of 2 x 2 m. The pricetag is that cropgrass1.png is 617K , cropgrass.dds is 2.7 M, so the dds textures take ~4.5 times the diskspace (and download bandwidth) of their png counterparts (imagine how a widespread switch to dds would blow up the size of the GIT repository...)

Edit: It turns out I am wrong in the estimates here - the dds set has 2048x2048 resolution as Emilian points out, and at this size per storage space is quite a bit more efficient than png. The pixel would also then map to something like 50cm x 50 cm.


The better pixel size comes at increased tiling artefacts, which the dds set counters by having very low contrast inside the texture so as to create no visual cues to tiling. However, contrast inside the texture is an important device to hide the hard landclass boundaries (see the long version of this argument here, so from higher altitude, the dds set to first oder looks like the mapserver image of the landclass distribution painted with almost monochromatic colors. If you fly low dds is better, but if you're high up dds becomes more dull

Here's an older comparison:

dds (note the absence of any structures in the forest areas - looks almost like monochromatic green):

Image

non-dds (note how the forests show structure because the texture has structure):

Image

Again, my point not being that the dds scheme is bad, but being that there's a lot of things to consider and that many advantages of dds come with a pricetag and translate into disadvantages elsewhere.

Bottomline being - I have been thinking really a lot about texturing and how to make it better, what works, what fails, and what advantages and disadvantages of every scheme are. I might be biased to some degree since my work is on the repo as well, but I am fairly sure if I were convinced that the dds scheme is superior, I would do dds textures... Especially for Europe custom scenery (where the landclass boundaries are nice and the agriculture texturing fits) and from low altitude, dds tends to give the better results in most cases. In default scenery away from Europe from moderate to high altitude, the situation is reversed.

Final note: The discussion becomes a bit moot when you compare both schemes to what procedural texturing can do - because suddenly you can get 10 x 10 cm per pixel in closeup-scenes of the terrain

Image

and at the same time get rid of tiling artefacts at almost any size scale. So my answer to the texturing problem is the procedural scheme, because that can generate you spectacular visuals for any distance.
Last edited by Thorsten on Mon Dec 17, 2012 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thorsten
 
Posts: 12490
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:33 am

Forward compatibility

Postby Hooray » Mon Dec 17, 2012 1:13 pm

Thorsten wrote in Mon Dec 17, 2012 8:42 am:
I use Ubuntu 10.04 because of the long term commitment to support for this version, I have flightgear 2.4 and find now that most developments eg aircraft etc are not backward compatible, ie a330-200 series doesn't work and many other things


I don't think that's a particularly fair thing to ask, and I don't think you can run FSX airplanes on Microsoft FlightSim 8 (which is the proper comparison).

FG is (in a limited way) backward compatible in such that a 2.9 binary runs many airplanes which have been released with 2.4. What you're asking however is forward compatibility, i.e. a 2.4 binary should be able to run airplanes for future releases - and that's just impossible to do.

New airplanes rely on new features present in the binary - for example a lot of MFD and HUD technology is now being built around canvas. Cavas doen't exist in 2.4, so there is no way this can be supported properly, even if we wanted to. If you have 2.4, you'll need to use airplanes released for 2.4.


We should probably add this in some way to the wiki, because it seems to be a rather common complaint:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7335&p=148559&hilit=forward+compatibility#p148559

That said, some aircraft are obviously developed with backward compatibility in mind, such as the bluebird and a handful of others which provide different versions for different FG binaries. But like Thorsten said, this is only to a certain extent possible - and it is obviously a lot of work for the aircraft developers. Flug's bombable addon is another excellent example of an addon that is developed in a fashion to retain backward compatibility with earlier FG versions, and Thorsten's local/advanced weather systen is another example actually. However, this is obviously only possible to a certain degree. For example, Tom's canvas system is also being developed such that backward compatibility is an explicit design feature, yet - you will obviously need a binary that provides the canvas system, despite all the Nasal-space wrappers...
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU

Re: Help needed - market research for FG

Postby btw » Mon Dec 17, 2012 1:36 pm

Dear Thorsten,

I think you would be what I loosely refer to as the "Linux expert" (at least compared to me), so I understand your comments, my point is simply that most of us do not have the intimate knowledge and familiarity that you clearly do. I was relieved to find the following comrade with similar problems: http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear- ... 38817.html

Best Regards
btw
 
Posts: 63
Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2011 9:53 pm

PreviousNext

Return to Hangar talk

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest