PINTO wrote:@Thorsten
So people shouldn't let the devs know when there's a component of Flightgear that has a negative impact on their flightsimming experience while using FG?
Right. How will that attitude help attract younger people, people without much computer science experience, or people who are looking at the FG community determining if they want to be apart of it?
I in fact have coding experience, from Python/Lua all the way down to assembly. I will not, however, be helping out this project (in coding) in the least, other than some minor aircraft tweaking, largely due to how you treat people who come to these forums offering insight and suggestions.
Personally, I doubt that this is the reason for not getting involved in graphics stuff.
There are frankly many other factors that are a much greater barrier to entry.
I mean, Thorsten may be the primary developer involved in rendering/graphics who is active on the forum, but there are others, too - such as Stuart (who originally wrote the random vegetation code IIRC).
Also, if you disagree with the way Thorsten is handling such "feature requests", you are obviously invited to deal with them differently, especially should you have to contribute anything specific to the matter at hand.
That said, people who are active on the forum may not be as active on the devel list (and vice versa), which is to say that someone who seems to have a certain standing/reputation on one platform, may not be overly active on the other - and especially on the devel list, you will find others familiar with C++/OSG and OpenGL coding, who should feel quite comfortable reviewing any patches/feedback you may have to help improve the performance of rendering related code like the random trees.
I don't disagree that we may sometimes appear pretty harsh, or even blunt, but you also need to look at this from the perspective of those who literally spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours contributing to an OSS project, dedicating their skills, expertise and spare time - the worst, and most disrespectiful, thing someone can do to those people is to waste their time, because "spare time" is exactly the "currency" that counts in a volunteer-based project like FlightGear, where you can only contribute your skills and expertise if you have a sufficient degree of time, too.
Most of the time spent on the forum could be easily said to be a waste of people's time unfortunately, due to the nature of the typical exchange with end-users - for instance, look at my number of postings (right-hand side), it's somewhere around 8k, right - now let's imagine that each of those postings took on average 3-4 minutes to write - which is roughly 25k minutes, in other words, all that time could be spent elsewhere.
And now look at how many contributors are actually actively involved in the forum.
Personally, I don't mind dealing with people's ideas, feature requests - but the exchange should be fruitful/constructive, i.e. contain either sufficient information to be actionable (i.e. bug-reports), demonstrate sufficient follow-up to understand an issue, or sufficiently informed to have a brainstorming of what's possible.
So far, I have yet to see anything like this in this thread - which is unfortunate but true, and regardless of your background in python/lua and assembly language, I don't see anything suggesting that you would be any different (without meaning to offend you).
There is something like a signal/noise ratio, and people can usually spot pretty quickly if you are worth dealing with or not (sorry if that sounds pretty blunt, too) - either you are making a bug report, a feature requests or a suggestion - but you need to behave accordingly, especially if you want to be taken seriously.
If I were in abassign's position, I would team up with others interested in benchmarking and profiling FG, hoping to come up with findings that are sufficiently actionable for Thorsten and others to act upon those.
To be fair, you WILL also find postings by Thorsten and myself about "Rembrandt being too slow", along the lines of "something is wrong.... and needs fixing" - which is also not particularly informed admittedly, so there's that, too - and keep in mind that others like F-JJTH suggested that people getting bad performance on Rembrandt, would simply be incapable of configuring their computers properly.
If you think there is an actual issue/bug with a certain feature, please provide much more data - if in doubt, start a new thread, and ask how to do that, i.e. something along the lines of "feature XYZ seems to have an odd impact on my system (specs) when using the following settings (details), anybody else seeing this - is anybody interested in working out what is going on here? "
I am sure that you could be helpful without having to be a glsl/graphics expert.