Night Vision

[planetacancun]

The Rafale B has some night vision with the HUD:

[HHS]

1) First off, I'm a bit confused by the Effects and Shaders interface. I've yet to find out how models utilize an effect. Certainly, the "tree.eff" effect isn't applied to everything. Is this somehow setup in the tree models to the effect name ("Effects/tree")? I at least noticed that in "materials.xml" the Ocean material has an effect property set to "Effects/water", so that certainly is how materials handle it.

tree.eff is an effect file wich refers to the shader.
An .xml must include the link to this effect-file to show the shader. Here it is in the materials.xml

Shader.frag, Shader.vert --> .shader.eff --> .xml

All other questions will be maybe answered in data/Docs/README.effects.
If any further questions left please ask on the devel-list, as your request goes more into hard coded things, than really shaders.

[jack]

Nice! If this goes well I might look into putting it in the AH-1!

[HHS]

It looks like I may have to make more drastic edits and possibly change code to implement more. Any ideas?

Wow- that looks already great!
I think it is still a good idea to ask on the devel-list. Our graphic specialists don't use this forum too often, so you will get better answers there!
-->http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/Mailing_list

[HHS]

I appreciate the compliments!

HHS>> I will do just that. I once asked a question there and didn't get a response, and have had trouble getting FlightGear to compile, so I was a little hesitant. Time to suck it up and try again with these new questions!

Yep, that happens unfortunately from time to time.
But if you show your work already done, there is a chance.

[Gijs]

You can edit the dome color via sim/scene/dome (or sim/scene/sky, cannot check right now). Which will give you something like this (yes, I was trying to create a polar light effect) and by editing the other setting (sky or dome, not sure which one) land/model color will change. IIRC you do have to pause the sim, else the numbers get overwritten.

This is not the right way to do it, it should be done via some internal script of course, but it'll allow you to easily test color settings

[Ernest1984]

I think the sky should stay as it is - dark (it is how it looks in the NV googles).
It looks great already

[Zan]

1) First off, I'm a bit confused by the Effects and Shaders interface. I've yet to find out how models utilize an effect. Certainly, the "tree.eff" effect isn't applied to everything. Is this somehow setup in the tree models to the effect name ("Effects/tree")? I at least noticed that in "materials.xml" the Ocean material has an effect property set to "Effects/water", so that certainly is how materials handle it.

Terrain effects are set in materials.xml, models may define their own effects inside their .xml files, and some effects are hard coded in the source. For example trees and clouds use a hard coded effect path. Skydome and 2d clouds iirc do not use any shaders.

Basically there is no way to define an effect that could be used everywhere (at least since soem elements do not use those at all...). Might be possible to do some kind of hack though.

2) Also, what is the purpose of 'n' in this statement:

Code: Select all

  <technique n="10">

Effects can be inherited, so that the effect on top is selected if all it's conditions are true, or if not, one below it will be used. The n number in technique tells the order in which the techniques are tried. I don't remember if smaller or larger number are tried first.

Basically you could inherit your shader from some other shader and add a condition for the night-vision-enabled, and by selecting a proper n order for your shader, it would override the default shader when night vision is enabled.

3) Additionally, what happens if you do not wish to set a value and omit it in an effect file? Must all values be set? Would you inherit from the "model-default" effect to do this or is there another methodology?

If the effect is inherited, I think you only need to define the parameters you want to change. Not sure about this though.

4) Finally, I'm willing to take suggestions on the implementation of this.

I'd say an effect like this should be a post-process effect, so that you first render the scene normally and then apply a full-screen effect that changes the colors and adds noise and whatever. This would probably need HDR rendering so that the darkest colors could be amplified, and the post processing system is not yet properly implemented in fg.

HTH, Zan

[falafel]

I got this by changing values of /rendering/scene/ambient/green to 0.5 while flying at night.
As said before, this can only be achieved while paused. If someone knows what to change in order to make it persist, it could be the answer for all those willing to fly night missions.
I wonder if the solution would be something related to hack the new menu with anaglyph support, making a new option that would be 2d but using green light.

[SharjeelHKh]

I found this post very productive and able to see the results straight away by editing ALL frag shaders in FlightGear directly the code TYother mentioned above.

TYother-> Have u able to make this effect optional at runtime using any property etc..?

[sgofferj]

I was thinking if there maybe is another approach than core-hacking.
Some aircraft have windows which are a bit tinted or have different effects.

Would it be possible to define some kind of material shader that simply alters the light that passes through this material, so you have the NVG effect? Aircraft/cockpit developers could then use this material e.g. for the frontplate of an MFD or for the HUD. Or for defining a view that realistically mimics NV goggles.

Considering how realistic and real-world-physics-based FG is, I thought, mimicking the function of a real-world NV system (i.e. altering the light that passes through it) would be the logical approach...

[Johan G]

There was some experimenting with that some time ago using shader effects I think, but it seem to have been a dead end. Se this topic: Night vision.

[sgofferj]

That is exactly this topic here

[Johan G]

Oops. Should at least have read the title of the topic before posting...

EDIT: Not to mention reading a few posts back...

[sgofferj]

I was playing around. It's pretty easy to get the picture partially green. The VMX22's windows have a png mapped to it as shader. Making this 50% green-transparent already gives a pretty green picture.


Unfortunately, I don't know anything about shaders... If somebody could point me to a good reference...?