Sorry, only just realized that you responded here:
Subject: MirrorsTheEagle wrote:Okay, I'll ask on the devel list then !
About the feature request, where would I post that ? As a "bug report" on the SourceForge bug tracker ?
As for the wiki pages, they haven't been updated for at least a year …
I believe the sourceforge tracker would be the best place to track this - the wiki/forum and the devel list have plenty of materials to cover this idea, and most importantly, we aready have patches - so I suppose, it's going to be implemented/integrated sooner or later.
Most of us have previously tinkered with it, so there's quite a bit of code/patches related to this idea.
And once you understand how the Canvas system works, what Canvas elements are and how a Canvas placement works, you basically understand just how powerful the whole idea is: We're simply going to add a new canvas element that instantiates a compositor, at that point we can apply custom effects/shaders per canvas element:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_deve ... 2F_ShadersSome people have tinkered with the idea to also use this approach to render raster maps based on actual fgfs scenery, so that in-sim maps match actual fgfs scenery, which would also allow us to hook up these maps to the built-in Phi/mongoose back-end, which is currently using external web services instead:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_tile_element Stuart in particular mentioned on several occasions that he needed this functionality (canvas + effects/shaders + camera views) to implement support for synthetic terrain view for his FG1000:
Subject: Gear view in cockpit computerstuart wrote:I'm happy to review any patches and get them committed. Please ping me when you think the code is worth checking in. It doesn't have to be perfect - Particularly once the current release is out.
The corresponding canvas element would then support element specific "compositor" instances that could be configured per canvas, to enable/disable individual features of each view:
Subject: Canvas::View element: performance/optimizationsIcecode GL wrote:In my opinion the three changes that would result in the best improvement would be:
- Draw masks, mainly for PFDs and similar stuff where we don't need to render the whole scene.
- Customizable shaders. Rendering the scene twice in ALS doesn't come cheap, so external camera views and mirrors could use lower ALS quality settings. In the of PFDs, it would allow to have that synthetic terrain appearance that Hooray was talking about.
- Configurable refresh rate per view. 15 fps might be enough for a external camera, we don't need to draw at max rate.
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_view_camera_element