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Planets

Postby MIG29pilot » Tue Jul 07, 2015 5:19 pm

Has anyone considered making scenery for new planets and moons in FG? The you could send an Apollo module to the moon!
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Re: Planets

Postby legoboyvdlp » Tue Jul 07, 2015 6:15 pm

It has been thought of, but AFAIK, it won't happen unless someone does it :P
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Re: Planets

Postby Hooray » Tue Jul 07, 2015 6:25 pm

Thorsten's approach for implementing the EarthView addon is sufficiently generic to also implement other celestial bodies like this - scenery itself is a different matter though, but the TerraGear tool chain will process pretty much any elevation data you throw at it and try to turn it into scenery (DEM for Mars being freely available)
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Re: Planets

Postby psadro_gm » Tue Jul 07, 2015 6:54 pm

As it stands, simgear's reference ellipsoid is earth. Terragear uses these functions (a lot) when generating scenery. We'd need to be able to plug in the parameters for each planet...

#define _EQURAD 6378137.0
#define _FLATTENING 298.257223563
#define _POLRAD 6356752.3142451794975639668
#define _SQUASH 0.9966471893352525192801545
#define _STRETCH 1.0033640898209764189003079
#define E2 fabs(1 - _SQUASH*_SQUASH)
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Re: Planets

Postby Hooray » Tue Jul 07, 2015 7:44 pm

yes, right, but if someone wanted to do this, those are preprocessor macros that could be easily exposed/overridden via CLI flags - I mean, it's the equivalent of running sed against the SG/TG source trees to replace any references to the corresponding macros to a std::map<std::string, double> lookup table that gets populated during initialization (i.e. values being defaulted to what they are now).

Alternatively, we could have a planet.xml file using the existing propertyList xml file dialect and let people create/provide such files for whatever they want to do.

Replacing those constants is relatively straightforward compared to all the data manipulation and DEM processing that TG can already handle, and I guess there are quite a few other hard-coded assumptions in various parts of SG/FG and TG, too

Then again, this is a long-standing idea, and even some of the original TG authors (think Curt) were tossing with such ideas - to see for yourself, search the archives for "TerraGear mars" or "TerraGear planets"

The main reference thread dating back to early 2002: Getting settled in my new "home" / Mars Scenery (look for answers from Curt, Jon, David Megginson

So preparing SG/TG to make such things possible would definitely be a worthwhile thing according to quite a number of discussions in the archives (many of which being inspired by X-Plane's Mars mode) - and with JSBSim already supporting custom atmosphere models, and given the recent revamped interest supporting spaceflight, why not ? :D

It's seems we're already well on our way ...
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Re: Planets

Postby VicMar » Wed Jul 08, 2015 8:06 am

If you start (KFSO?) a flight to Neptune your FG will be tied up for a few years. Not my idea of fun!
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Re: Planets

Postby clrCoda » Wed Jul 08, 2015 8:10 am

unless you use the time speedups

still, that was funny :)
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Re: Planets

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jul 08, 2015 9:23 am

unless you use the time speedups


Even if you use them.
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Re: Planets

Postby VicMar » Wed Jul 08, 2015 10:08 am

Hey Thorsten,
Is it possible to make a sub-system which would put FG pilots to sleep for a few years?

I can think of a some who should be forced to use it. Image

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Re: Planets

Postby legoboyvdlp » Wed Jul 08, 2015 1:47 pm

So really, we'd need portals in FlightGear to jump to other planets! Maybe a dialog box, select a planet, then climb to 100km and jump to the other planet? :P
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Re: Planets

Postby Hooray » Wed Jul 08, 2015 1:53 pm

Also see the proposal/discussion at: New SimGear Class definition
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Re: Planets

Postby Thorsten » Wed Jul 08, 2015 6:14 pm

I'd be far more enthusiastic about the whole thing if anyone would propose to actually do something. Just stating what we need and what would be cool to have though isn't generating the manpower for anything.
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Re: Planets

Postby Hooray » Wed Jul 08, 2015 6:34 pm

If you are referring to my postings, I was merely pointing out that these are long-standing ideas/feature requested, that were originally even posted by some of the more senior contributors - like psadro_gm mentioned, those macros would need to be replaced with something more flexible (e.g. a lookup table) that is populated during initialization.
Personally, I am not too enthusiastic to fire up an IDE to work on this, because this is -frankly- outside my area of interest, but primarily, because I have contributed a number of patches in response to "calls for help" made by core developers, that ended up just wasting my time, because patches were either never properly reviewed, or because some "consensus" was changed behind the scenes.

Then again, if anybody is interested in working on this (and if one of the TG devs can be convinced to review/rework and commit things), I am definitely going to provide help and support - i.e. in the form of git/C++ advice to replace such constants with a lookup table that is dynamically populated - e.g. using a PropertyList XML file or CLI arguments.
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Re: Planets

Postby psadro_gm » Wed Jul 08, 2015 6:52 pm

I'm up to my eyeballs fixing issues we're finding in the next ws release in the stable branch. When I get time away from that, I'm working in the feature branch for new stuff. I'd like to have earth modeled as an oriented 2-manifold surface so we can work on LOD.

It's true that this work isn't in conflict with using terragear tools to generate other planets. A robust toolchain should be considered a prerequisite for any scenery generation :) It's just that this doesn't interest me at all.
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Re: Planets

Postby Hooray » Wed Jul 08, 2015 6:55 pm

same here, but I think it would suffice to find someone willing (and able) to review/commit related patches and see if anybody else is willing to come up with the corresponding patches to teach TerraGear how to deal with custom ellipsoids by replacing those constants with a lookup table...
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