"I've managed to fix this by differentiating rebuilding the 3D layers
(e.g. due to METAR updates) from rebuilding the entire environment (due to a
change in scenario)."
/me: property-browser.xml: drop a redundant line
Attached is yet another 3D clouds patch, to fix the following:
1) The 3D clouds were not modified by the cloud coverage, due to some problems with osg::Switch
2) METAR changes to cloud coverage were not obeyed.
3) Making changes via the Cloud dialog had no effect unless 3D clouds were toggled.
4) Cloud cover was too sparse.
5) 3D Stratus clouds caused performance issues on some hardware (fixed by removing 3D stratus from cloudlayers.xml - it will now be a 2D layer).
Reacting to a feature request, attached patch adds support for
parkpos selection in the "location on ground" dialog, and clears any
parkpos preset in the "airports" dialog.
- Removes the cloud type re-use code - I think they aren't worth the graphical artefacts that they cause in light of Tim's improvements
- Changes the transparency of the clouds. Previously, the clouds were transparent at 0m distance, opaque at 200m, then gradually more transparent to the fog limits. This meant they were generally quite transparent. Now, they are opaque from 200m to 15km, then become transparent at 20km. A side effect of this is that the current textures could probably benefit from being made slightly transparent to improve the blending of the sprites against each other.
This provides the following enhancements & bug fixes
- Fix the chequer-board bug.
- Add proper cloud coverage function - so scattered clouds are now truly scattered.
- Add real-time control for visibility range.
- Use a limited set of clouds rather than generating a completely new Geode for each cloud. This saves sorting and display time.
- Add controls to Rendering dialog to allow fine-tuning of the number of sprites, cloud visibility and the number of different types of cloud.
- Add some variance to the sort back-off to avoid all clouds being sorted at the same time.
- Pack attributes into vectors for performance
- Re-order the cloud type determination code so that if a cloud layer could either be stratus or cumulus, cumulus is used.
- Lowered the cloud level in the standard cloud configuration slightly so a cumulus layer is generated rather than stratus.
These last two mean that you should see some 3D cumuli if disabling real weather fetch.
My thanks to Yon Uriarte for his help with performance work.
(/sim/rendering/precipitation-gui-enabled) *and* if the aircraft wants it
(/sim/rendering/precipitation-aircraft-enabled). Some aircraft model rain
on the windshield and want to turn rain off for interior views.
