The general idea is to help clean up some aspects of the FDM init and be
able to provide startup conditions in a less ambiguous manner.
Previously, things like positions, orientations, and velocites were set on
"the bus". These had to be read by the FDMs which then were supposed to
initialized themselves to those values and turn write around and start
modifying those values. It was messy and cumbersome.
Now, all the initial fdm conditions are written to a sub-[property-]tree
under /sim/presets/
The values in /sim/presets/ always stay set to what the user has specified.
The user can change these at his/her liesure, and then request a "reset"
which will reset to the new conditions. I don't even want to say how this
worked before. :-)
Now, an script, or gui interface can stage a set of initial conditions while
the sim is running (without disrupting it), and then call "reset" to commit
the change.
People who should worry about all this are FDM writters, and a small few
others who care about over all program structure and flow.
are now working. A runway light is defined by a point and a direction. The
point and direction are combined with the local up vector to create a small
triangle orthogonal to the direction. The two ficticous corners of the
triangle are given an alpha value of zero, the orignal corner is given an
alpha of one. The triangle is drawn in glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT, GL_POINT)
mode which means only the corner points are drawn, and since two have alpha=0
only the original point is drawn. This is a long way to go to draw a point,
but it ensures that the point is only visible within 90 degrees of the light
direction, behind the light it is not visible. This is still a long way
to get to drawing a point, but we use an environement map, with the direction
vector as the normal to mimic a light that is brightest when viewed head
on and dimmest when viewed perpendicularly or disappears when viewed from
behind.
- warning, there is a bug in how the current runway light direction vector
is calculated which will adversely effect runway lighting. The airports
should be regenerated in order to fix this problem.
Animations are now contained within the scene graph itself and are
updated whenever the graph is traversed -- that saves time by not
updating animations not currently in sight, and it allows animations
to be used for static objects and random objects as well.
Added new FGModelLoader and FGTextureLoader classes. These are intern
tables for models, to guarantee (mostly) that no model is loaded more
than once. FGTextureLoader is not yet used anywhere, but
FGModelLoader is now in place everywhere that ssgLoad* used to be
used (thus adding the ability to use animations).
In the future, FGModelLoader will add some interesting functionality,
including the ability to reload 3D models on the fly.
Your 3D models cause a stackdump when the base is separate from the
root. I've attached a patched newmat.cxx - you may want to test it
before committing!
I changed the code such that textures terrain also takes ambient,
diffuse, specular and emissive from the materials.xml file.
[note from dpm: doesn't seem to work yet]
-----------------------------------------------
Fixed a segfault on exit.
Changed the radius of the dummy bounding sphere from 10m to 1000m to
ensure that FOV culling doesn't leave anything out.
Allow an object to have more than one variant model, which will be
chosen randomly. Simply repeat the <path>...</path> property.
Removed the <billboard> property and replaced it with <heading-type>,
which can be set to "fixed" (leave the model oriented as it is),
"random" (give the model a random heading between 0 and 359 deg), or
"billboard" (always turn the model to face the camera). The default
is "fixed". Models look much better when they are not all facing the
same direction.
Allow the user to group models with the same visual range, so that
there can be *many* fewer nodes in the scene graph when the models are
not visible. This causes an XML-format change, so that instead of
<object>
<range-m>...</range-m>
...
</object>
<object>
<range-m>...</range-m>
...
</object>
...
we now have
<object-group>
<range-m>...</range-m>
<object>
...
</object>
<object>
...
</object>
...
</object-group>
Every object in a group can still have its own model(s), coverage, and
heading-type, but they all share the same range selector.
This change should already help users with tight memory constraints,
but it will matter much more when we add more object types -- for
example, we can now add dozens of different urban building types
without bloating the scene graph or slowing down the LOD tests for
tris that are out of range (i.e. most of them).
1. Only one copy of each object (and its texture) is stored in memory,
no matter how many materials use it.
2. Random objects are added to a triangle only when the objects are in
range, and they are deleted as soon as the objects are out of
range. That way, only a relatively small number of ssg nodes are
used at any one time.
This patch seems to eliminate freezes when tiles are freed. There are
occasional stutters at extremely high speeds (i.e. over 3,000kt), but
it seems smooth enough for normal aviation speeds.
The first hunk might not be necessary, but the light_coverage property
was the only one that wasn't explicitly defaulted, which is unfair. ;-)
The second hunk adds the missing initialization to the init routine.
This is necessary, because (unlike the material entries from material.xml)
the generated light entries don't get the light coverage set. Yet
obj.cxx:795 reads this information out fot every leaf, although not needed
in the case of lights. Avoiding this isn't worth the trouble.
The last hunk sets the missing normal_index. The POINTS branch in
gen_leaf was always called with this int_list empty, which made the normals
handling use data garbage.
/sim/freeze/master (implimented)
/sim/freeze/fuel (implimented)
/sim/freeze/position (not implimented)
/sim/freeze/time-of-day (not implimented)
/sim/freeze/master is bound to the 'p' key via keyboard.xml, however,
/sim/freeze/fuel is not bound to anything at the moment so you must
change it via the external property interface, or specify an initial
value on the command line.
material-specific logic is now removed from the material library and
encapsulated in the material class itself, and materials are loaded
from $FG_ROOT/materials.xml rather than $FG_ROOT/materials. This also
removes a nasty bug in the old material-loading code that caused a
floating-point exception.
have multiple ptrs to individual entries (aliases) but the destructor was
trying to delete every ptr so it would delete already freed memory for aliases.
I implimented a simple ref counting scheme (similar to the plib mechanism) to
track references to material lib entries and only "delete" them when the last
reference is removed.
He writes:
Here are the final changes to add threads to the tile loading. All the
thread related code is in the new FGTileLoader class.
./configure.in
./acconfig.h
Added --with-threads option and corresponding ENABLE_THREADS
definition. The default is no threads.
./src/Scenery/tilemgr
Removed load_queue and associated references. This has been replaced by
a new class FGTileLoader in FGNewCache.
Made the global variable global_tile_cache a member.
schedule_needed(): removed global_tile_cache.exists() tests since
sched_tile() effectively repeats the test.
initialize_queue(): removed code that loads tiles since this is now
performed by FGTileLoader.
update(): ditto
./src/Scenery/newcache
Added new class FGTileLoader to manage tile queuing and loading.
tile_map typedefs are private.
exists() is a const member function.
fill_in(): deleted
load_tile(): added.
./src/Scenery/FGTileLoader
The new threaded tile loader. Maintains a queue of tiles waiting to be
loaded and an array of one or more threads to load the tiles. Currently
only a single thread is created. The queue is guarded by a mutex to
synchronize access. A condition variable signals the thread when the
queue is non-empty.
CLO: I made a few tweaks to address a couple issues, hopefully what we
have is solid, but now we kick it out to the general public to see. :-)
