BrendaEM wrote:Flight Unlimited 2, a ten year old program had good scenery at all altitudes except for at ground levels. That's where overlay textures work well.
[...]
Should not Flightgear be able to equal this 10 year old effort?
Certainly, FlightGear even should get better. BUT, the decision, which route to take, should be made carefully. Simply putting loads of aerial and/or satellite imagery into FlightGear won't work out because neither your harddisk nor the memory bandwidth nor the graphics board in your computer will be able to handle it.
Look at this sort of 'flight simulation':
http://ossim.telascience.org/ossimdata/nhv/DSCF0129.JPG
They _are_ using images instead of tiled textures for their setup - and in order to handle the load they connect their display systems using 10 Gig Ethernet to a terribly fast storage system that holds _terabytes_ of imagery. Using images for a _very_ limited terrain area might work out, but for a flight simulator that comes with global scenery coverage and is supposed to run on desktop computers this is certainly not the right scale
The approach to get things working on small computers is a different one: Create a coverage using detailed polygons and fill these with tiled textures. The Custom Scenery Project:
http://www.custom-scenery.org/Satellite-Image.304.0.html
is aiming at developing tools to generate such polygon data - the development process is far from being ready for general consumption but things look quite promising. Actually, for OpenSource projects that have _so_ few developers - this is primarily a single person and I'm trying to arrange some support for him - you have to think in terms of years instead of months or weeks for such sophisticated and complicated development to get into a releasble state.
Regards, Martin.