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Mirrors

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Re: Mirrors

Postby wkitty42 » Mon Mar 15, 2021 2:40 pm

owenpsmith wrote in Mon Mar 15, 2021 7:54 am:I’m happy to wait for the finished product, I don’t need any more reasons for postponing my aircraft development, life is doing that for me too much as it is.

FWIW: i posted my original reply mainly because i didn't want to see you spend (a lot of?) time developing something that would be thrown out later and redone with the new capability...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Mirrors

Postby Hooray » Mon Mar 15, 2021 5:22 pm

To be honest, this might seem like something that is almost around the next corner - especially because the Compositor and CompositeViewer efforts gained quite some traction recently. On the other hand, these feature requests and discussions are even dating back to the pre Canvas days. It's just that given current capabilities (and ongoing changes), that the CompositeViewer+Compositor via Canvas pathway makes the most sense. But I still wouldn't hold my breath, this definitely needs some work - and looking at what Fernando and Jules are juggling already, it isn't farfetched to say that someone stepping up to help with that work, might be very welcome. This is the sort of feature that will undoubtedly go through several iterations and revisions, especially once people/early-adopters are beginning to provide feedback.
In its current form it's only useful to people who can patch/rebuild fgfs, and the current release plan also isn't saying anything about this capability specifically, so it's not at the top of anybody's todo list for the time being.
But who knows, maybe another hackathon round might change things ...
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Re: Mirrors

Postby TheEagle » Wed Jun 08, 2022 1:11 am

Has there been any progress on this topic ? There's a gear mirror on my Cessna 210 ! ;) Also those 210's were retrofitted with Garmin panels quite often … but a Garmin PFD without synthetic vision simply isn't a Garmin PFD …
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Re: Mirrors

Postby Hooray » Wed Jun 08, 2022 3:11 pm

I am not really following the project currently, but I highly doubt there's been any recent progress.
If in doubt, post on the devel list to check back with Fernando and Jules, both of whom are primarily active over there.

Like I said elsewhere, we do have a working prototype, so for someone with a working build environment, able to patch/rebuild fgfs from source, it would be relatively straightforward to use those patches and see how things are looking.
Obviously, some C++/OpenGL or OSG knowledge could go a long way to help get this reviewed/improved and integrated.

Like you said, the underlying infrastructure isn't specific to just mirrors, but also needed for modern avionics (external views, cameras as well as synthetic terrain).
Stuart mentioned on several occasions that he'd need the same functionality for his FG1000 sooner or later.

So, there's at least 3 folks who you could ping to see how things are standing.

In the meantime, it would definitely make sense to file a corresponding feature request, to make it easier for people to track development related to this (I doubt that the wiki page has been updated recently?)
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Re: Mirrors

Postby TheEagle » Wed Jun 08, 2022 3:29 pm

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 …
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Re: Mirrors

Postby Hooray » Tue Jan 31, 2023 4:43 pm

Sorry, only just realized that you responded here:

Subject: Mirrors
TheEagle 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_Shaders
Image

Some 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
Image

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 computer
stuart 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/optimizations

Icecode GL wrote:In my opinion the three changes that would result in the best improvement would be:
  1. Draw masks, mainly for PFDs and similar stuff where we don't need to render the whole scene.
  2. 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.
  3. 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
Image
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