- 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.
- Replaces simple shader attributes with vectors (this was missed out of the last patch by mistake)
- Includes Yon's Fog update code (Thanks!)
- Fixes a bug since 1.0 where --enable-real-weather-fetch stopped the other weather scenarios from working.
- 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.
It fixes the following issues (to a greater or lesser extent):
1) Performance. Quad trees used to improve culling, and the sprites are placed on the surface of a sphere rather than
randomly throughout the cloud, requiring fewer textures. This saves about 5-10fps on my machine.
2) Disabled 3D clouds have no performance impact. Previously they were still in the scenegraph. Now they are removed.
3) Clouds are now loaded on start-up, and don't require the scenario to be changed, they also work with METAR.
4) The cloud field is shifted as you travel. There's a small bug in that the clouds "jump" as you reach the edge of the field.
5) Iterative sorting of sprites. This doesn't appear to solve the alpha blending problem completely, but may help a bit.
- Runways are now part of an airport, instead of a separate list
- Runways are no longer represented as a boring struct, but as a class
of their own.
-Improved runway access to unify various runway access methods.
* experimental clean-up / reduction on two of the FG headers:
(I'm going to await feedback on the developers list before doing more of
these, to avoiding going over files multiple times, but in principle it
seems pretty straightforward.)
* final fixes for SG_USING_STD removal
- this exposed a bizarre issue on Mac where dragging in <AGL/agl.h> in
extensions.hxx was pulling in all of Carbon to the global namespace
- very scary. As a result, I now need to explicitly include CoreFoundation
in fg_init.cxx.
- change SG_USING_STD(x) to using std::x
SimGear change. It changes all the SG_xxxx to be the 'real' includes, and gets
rid of many #ifdef SG_HAVE_STD_INCLUDES. As an added bonus, rather than
replacing 'SG_USING_NAMESPACE(std)' with 'using namespace std', I just fixed
the small number of places to use std:: explicitly. So we're no longer polluting
the global namespace with the entire contents of std, in many cases.
There is one more 'mechanical' change to come - getting rid of SG_USING_STD(X),
but I want to keep that separate from everything else. (There's another
mechnical change, replacing <math.h> with <cmath> and so on *everywhere*, but
one step at a time)
Reindent to Stroustrup style.
Make FGPrecipitationMgr an SGSubsystem and remove all references to it
in main.cxx and renderer.cxx.
Use SGGeod::makeZUpFrame instead of a private function in
tileentry.cxx. Rewrite that function, WorldCoordinate, to use
makeZUpFrame too.
the next airport or airport with METAR station, but about any type of
airport
- as a side effect this change makes it also 30 to 50% faster :-)
In the long run this linear search shall be replaced with a spatial
algorithm (like octree), which will be a much bigger performance gain.
Turn OPENSCENEGRAPH_MAJOR_VERSION, OPENSCENEGRAPH_MINOR_VERSION and
OPENSCENEGRAPH_PATCH_VERSION into a single number for comparisons in the
preprocessor.
Anders said:
With Stuart's help I've looked closer at this and I think I've tracked
down the cause of the problem:
At least on my computer the sort() call on line 234 in
Environment/environment_ctrl.cxx sorts the vector entries by memory
address instead of altitude, i.e. the custom comparison predicate is not
used. This causes the tables of environment conditions to be reordered
into a wrong order at some weather updates, depending, basically,
on where the memory allocator places the objects. (Btw. why are they are
freshly allocated for each update?)
"interpolates METAR changes over time as follows:
1) Wind changes are interpolated as vectors, so the change is much more
natural than before - no-longer will your aircraft be suddenly shoved to
one side.
2) Visibility is interpolated as an X-value, which looks pretty neat.
3) Cloud heights and thicknesses are interpolated if they are close to the
aircraft. Cloud textures are not."
"bind the visibility-property of the SGSky object to a property
named /envirionment/effective-visibility-m. This property is needed to decide
if the aircraft is within clouds or not. I use this property also for the
structural icing code."
SGPropertyNode to guarded ones. This is also done for JSBSim/JSBSim.hxx,
for which JSB had given explicit permission a while ago. I postponed that
back then, but now is the time.
mf:
pthread_cancel doesn't seem to work correctly on all supported platforms.
It apparently causes SGBlockingQueue::pop() to correctly leave the thread on
the cancellation point pthread_wait(), but the SGGuard() destructor isn't
called, so the queue mutex remains locked. This triggered an assert() on
pthread_join(). This patch uses an empty ICAO request as signal for the
thread to terminate itself.
- remove cleanup handler that unlocks unused mutex
- make the result_queue a locking queue (blocking is only done in the
pop() anyway, and this isn't used in the thread at all)
- don't disallow thread cancelling in the request_queue's pop(), which
is the only cancellation point in this thread
