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Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Vinny002 » Mon Dec 23, 2019 3:08 am

Guys, question for you, is there a new version of earth view - an orbital terrain rendering engine? Thanks!!

Cheers,
Vincent
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Mon Dec 23, 2019 8:08 am

What about the existing version do you not like?

Aka - what is the point of asking for new versions of everything? Do you actually want to have new features, or do you like having new versions for the sake of having new versions, regardless of whether there's anything you can actually use?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby GinGin » Mon Dec 23, 2019 9:08 am

And are you using the basic textures or did you download high definition one ?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Vinny002 » Mon Dec 23, 2019 9:39 pm

I think I am using the basic earth view but I am not sure. @Thorsten: I think you hurt my feelings.

Cheers,
Vincent
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby GinGin » Mon Dec 23, 2019 9:53 pm

Then have a look there :


http://wiki.flightgear.org/Earthview

Don’t get wrong what said Thorsten.
You are asking a lot if new features are coming, but there are already a lot to do and to master with the current version
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Vinny002 » Mon Dec 23, 2019 10:00 pm

Very interesting!! As for the land masses it is hard to tell what country I am flying over.

Cheers,
Vincent
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Tue Dec 24, 2019 8:38 am

@Thorsten: I think you hurt my feelings.


Why? It's a genuine question. I've written Earthview, I've documented it, for me it delivers rather nice results - so now someone comes along and asks for a new version. Naturally I wonder - why would that be?

Likewise with the Shuttle - you report that you have some trouble getting the Shuttle into orbit - which means you're working at a very basic level. The differences between milestone 11 and milestone 12 are mainly capture procedures and high-level systems procedures, the current devel version adds rather exotic MPS failures. So you actually would not even notice any difference between version with what you're doing.

Again I wonder - why would you want to have a new version? Why are you unhappy with the stable version?

I'm genuinely trying to understand here.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby wlbragg » Fri Dec 27, 2019 10:29 pm

I'm don't know, but maybe @Vinny002 is confused by the talk of the higher resolution images as being a different or new version?
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby eatdirt » Wed Jan 22, 2020 10:24 am

Hi Thorsten,
I am wondering what is happening in Earthview with the alpha-channel of the terrain normalmaps, your comment here triggered the question:

Code: Select all
 // sanity processing for normal map when alpha is close to zero
        nmap.rgb = normalize(nmap.rgb);


I am just asking because last year I was adding support for high-res normal mapping in the Chris Blues' scripts, and I am suspecting that these high-res normal maps are not working at all. Looking carefully, I see that I have (involuntary) added an alpha-channel to the png normal maps, they are RGBA instead of RGB, and that seems to be the culprit! (tested by removing the A channel in gimp, and they work).

Thanks,
Cheers,
Chris.

NB: When they work, it is spectacular by the way...
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jan 22, 2020 10:25 am

The alpha channel holds the heightmap (which should match the normal map in the color components).

And they do work fine here (I'm using Chris'16 k dds set).
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby eatdirt » Wed Jan 22, 2020 10:59 am

And they do work fine here (I'm using Chris'16 k dds set)


Mmm, that's weird, I wrote that part. I'll test again from scratch then, maybe Chris's fixed it. But in my case, the alpha is 0, which explains why that does not work then.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jan 22, 2020 11:32 am

I don't remember whether alpha = 1 or alpha = 0 was sea level though... It made a difference and I've settled on what worked best.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby eatdirt » Wed Jan 22, 2020 3:34 pm

I've checked more carefully, in the fgdata directory, the default normalmaps are without an alpha channel and they do work fine.

However, in the torrent package "Earthview-Complete/", the normalmaps have an alpha channel that seems to be null, and the only thing they do is to shade the world texture. I am now playing with the convert script [and normalmap binary] to really add an alpha channel = height, or inverse, let's see how that ends up.

There maybe a bit of confusion about what we call the 16k textures, the original ones were not shipping high-res normal mappings, or if they did the normalmaps had been generated by other means than the convert script, which was not outputing normal maps at that time. If you have those, then that's possible that they do work fine, but the more recent ones do not.
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jan 22, 2020 4:48 pm

Yes, I think there's a conditional - if you have an alpha channel then it gets interpreted, if you do not then that part is just skipped.

If you have those, then that's possible that they do work fine, but the more recent ones do not.


I developed the code which renders the altitude-dependent atmosphere thickness with the ones I have after bouncing this back and forth with Chris, so mine work fine because they define the working standard 8)
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Re: Earthview - an orbital terrain rendering engine [v2.0]

Postby eatdirt » Wed Jan 22, 2020 6:20 pm

:)
I think the standard is then ALPHA is INVERSE HEIGHT:

No normal map
Image

Yes normal map
Image

I have been flying over a flat world before :)
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