I wrote:
> I can confirm this. Layers on the 2D panels (but oddly, only the 2D
> panels) aren't drawing over the background with the current ATI
> drivers.
OK, this turns out to be a trivial fix, although I still think it's a
driver bug. There are two calls to glPolygonOffset in the panel
rendering code (shared by both 2D and 3D panels). One is called
per-layer, and sets up a layer-specific offset. The other is called
for drawing the background textures, to lift them off of any
underlying cockpit geometry.
I was using different "factor" values for each, incorrectly. Patch
attached. It was affecting only 2D panels because the 3D ones don't
use background images.
Problem is, by my reading of the specification the bug should have had
the effect of pushing the background texture *farther* behind the
instruments, instead of pulling it on top of them. Either I'm reading
the spec incorrectly or ATI has inverted the sense of the factor
argument. Dunno, I'll submit a bug report to them and see what
happens.
> Jim Wilson wrote:
> > How hard would it be to have a property that toggles hotspot
> > visibility? It'd be nice to be able to turn it on and have yellow
> > rectangles show up on the hotspots...
>
> That's not a bad idea.
It's actually an astoundingly good idea, and implementable over lunch
to boot. :)
Try the attached patch, which predicates the boxes on the
/sim/panel-hotspots property. I mapped a toggle event on this to a
spare joystick button, and had fun. :)
[dpm: bound to Ctrl-C]
avoid having the 2D instruments obscure 3D objects in front of them):
It's related to depth buffer precision. On my Geforce cards (2MX and
3), it never happens with the 24 bit depth buffer you get by default
at 32bpp. At 16bpp, it picks a slimmer depth buffer (probably 16 bit)
and the texture layers bleed through.
The code is using a pretty big argument to glPolygonOffset, and I've
never investigated how small it can be. If someone has a little time
the next time they see this issue, try changing the value of
POFF_UNITS at the top of Cockpit/panel.cxx. Decrease it until the
textures *just* start to interfere with each other, and post the value
that works for you.
The biggest and coolest patch adds mouse sensitivity to the 3D
cockpits, so we can finally work the radios. This ended up requiring
significant modifications outside of the 3D cockpit code. Stuff folks
will want to look at:
+ The list of all "3D" cockpits is stored statically in the
panelnode.cxx file. This is clumsy, and won't migrate well to a
multiple-aircraft feature. Really, there should be a per-model list
of 3D panels, but I couldn't find a clean place to put this. The
only handle you get back after parsing a model is a generic ssg
node, to which I obviously can't add panel-specific methods.
+ The aircraft model is parsed *very* early in the initialization
order. Earlier, in fact, than the static list of allowable command
bindings is built in fgInitCommands(). This is bad, as it means
that mouse bindings on the instruments can't work yet. I moved the
call to fgInitCommands, but someone should look carefully to see
that I picked the right place. There's a lot of initialization
code, and I got a little lost in there... :)
+ I added yet another "update" hook to the fgRenderFrame routine to
hook the updates for the 3D panels. This is only required for
"mouse press delay", and it's a fairly clumsy mechanism based on
frame rate instead of real time. There appears to be delay handling
already in place in the Input stuff, and there's a discussion going
on about different mouse behavior right now. Maybe this is a good
time to unify these two (now three) approaches?
really see anything different in the day, but as day turns to night the
panel smoothly darkens and the lighting component becomes visible.
Lights are wired to electrical system so if you kill power, you lose the
lights.
- Removed some old cruft.
- Removed some support for older versions of automake which technically was
correct, but caused the newer automakes to squawk warnings during an
initial sanity check (which isn't done very intelligently.)
NOTE: this fix is technically not correct for older version of automake.
These older version use the variable "INCLUDES" internally and could have
them already set to an important value. That is why we were appending
our values to them. However, newer versions of automake don't set this
value themselves so it is an error to append to a non-existant variable.
We seem to "get away" with overwriting the value on older versions of
automake, but if you have problems, consider upgrading to at least
automake-1.5.
- tidies up the update-time-step handling (making it a simple "dt");
- makes the altimeter get a proper pressure, and the (unused) vacuum
calculation get a proper RPM (*);
- replaces property name look-ups with static pointers to property nodes.
Notes from DPM:
- the static pointers are a very bad idea, but they're only temporary;
I plan to make FGSteam into a proper subsystem soon, and then they
can be member variables
- I fixed the patch to get the current static pressure from the
/environment/pressure-inhg property, so that the altimeter interacts
properly with FGEnvironment
+ The panel(s) are now an first-class SSG node inside the aircraft
scene graph. There's a little code added to model.cxx to handle the
parsing, but most of the changes are inside the new FGPanelNode
class (Model/panelnode.[ch]xx).
+ The old FGPanel source changed a lot, but mostly cosmetically. The
virtual-cockpit code moved out into FGPanelNode, and the core
rendering has been abstracted into a draw() method that doesn't try
to set any OpenGL state. I also replaced the old inter-layer offset
code with glPolygonOffset, as calculating the right Z values is hard
across the funky modelview matrix I need to use. The older virtual
panel code got away with it by disabling depth test, thus the "panel
draws on top of yoke" bug. PolygonOffset is really the appropriate
solution for this sort of task anyway.
+ The /sim/virtual-cockpit property is no more. The 2D panels are
still specified in the -set.xml file, but 3D panels are part of the
model file.
+ You can have as many 3D panels as you like.
Problems:
+ The mouse support isn't ready yet, so the 3D panels still aren't
interactive. Soon to come.
+ Being part of the same scene graph as the model, the 3D panels now
"jitter" in exactly the same way. While this makes the jitter of
the attitude gyro less noticeable, it's still *very* noticeable and
annoying. I looked hard for this, and am at this point convinced
that the problem is with the two orientation computations. We have
one in FGLocation that is used by the model code, and one in
FGViewer that is used at the top of the scene graph. My suspicion
is that they don't agree exactly, so the final orientation matrix is
the right answer plus the difference. I did rule out the FDMs
though. None of them show more than about 0.0001 degree of
orientation change between frames for a stopped aircraft. That's
within an order of magnitude of what you'd expect for the
orientation change due to the rotation of the earth (which we don't
model -- I cite it only as evidence of how small this is); far, far
less than one pixel on the screen.
[and later]
OK, this is fixed by the attached panel.cxx file. What's happened is
that the winding order for the text layer's polygons is wrong, so I
reverse it before drawing. That's largely a hatchet job to make
things work for now, though. We should figure out why the winding
order is wrong for only text layers and fix it. I checked the plib
sources -- they're definitely doing things CCW, as is all the rest of
the panel code.
Odd. I'm also not sure why the 2D panel doesn't care (it works in
both winding orders). But this will allow you to check in working
code, anyway. There's a big comment to this effect in there.
