by Thorsten » Fri Aug 05, 2016 6:07 am
In all these discussions, the same things keep being conflated which need to be kept separate:
* terrain data: What is the elevation at a coordinate, what is the landcover?
* artwork: What textures and 3d models are used
* renderer: How is lighting done in the scene, how is GPU post-processing of the scene employed
If I understand the Proland website correctly, they don't give you the first two - it's a library to do the last. The data you can download from a 3rd party site under severe restrictions.
If you use Proland with the FG terrain data, you get the same misplaced roads, coastline mismatches,... you get now - because it's in the data.
Conversely, if we would use the same data (which we can't, because it manifestly is not GPL compatible) we would get the same clean placement of roads, rivers,...).
I can render an only-forest scene in FG if I go to the right place and it's going to look on par or better than what's in that video (I like our trees much better for starters, we have more diversity in the forest,...) - and I suppose I have quite a few weather and atmosphere goodies the lib doesn't have.
Then you can compare one awesome FG promotional shot with one awesome Proland promotional shot.
However, if you go elsewhere, you need different artwork - trees look different in Spain than in Finland for starers, which is why forests look different. The ground changes color and hue. The shapes of fields are different. Town layouts are different, houses look different.
Even with the best possible rendering lib in the world, you wouldn't have the artwork available - because someone has to do it in a GPL compatible way.
And that's the FG scenery in a nutshell - the renderer can do much more than you usually see, except it doesn't get consistent terrain data and it has to use stock artwork instead of hand-crafted artwork for the particular region and most of its options aren't used because nobody bothered to spend time with that region.
When you admire any promotional video, usually what you admire is the data and artwork - and you'd not get any of those if you'd actually convince anyone that FG needs a different renderer - because for both there's a viable commercial market (think of all country-specific addons for FSX or X-Plane or all commercial geodata applications...) - so you won't get them under GPL.
I doubt any of you can actually tell me how the Proland renderer differs from what we have...