I have updated the lighting code to use fog to try to fade the runway lights
in smoothly, but still keep them from being visible until you are about 7-10
miles out, and then only have them be very faint at first. I think what I
have is a bit nicer than before since it completely avoids the "popping" effect,
but I've very open to tweaking the actual ranges based on people's real
world experiences.
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.
rabbit lights appear to almost work except the last light or two is never
included in the animation and longer strings of lights are drawn as all
light on ... :-(
Now the options can be localized as well. This adds a slight problem for
the --language options, but not that much (worst case, the strings are
loaded twice consuming some more memory). I tried to be as accurate as
posiible when copying the options texts, but there might be some
mostakes left.
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.
- 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.
Here are some changes that gave me a significant frame rate increase of about 10 fps with random objects disabled. The interesting thing is that these changes aren't in the main loop but are in tile loader. My guess is that I've reduced the memory footprint just enough to reduce CPU cache misses, though I have no hard evidence of this.
Initially I modified all SGBinObject member functions to pass/return by reference instead of by-value. This gives little or no speed up but allows for some optimizations in fgBinObjLoad(). It is these changes that reduce the number of memory allocations. Needless copying of vectors, and vectors of vectors, can be very memory intensive, especially if they are large.
Anyway I would be interested to see if you get similar results. I would emphasize that the frame rate increase only occurs with random objects disabled. I lose about 10-15 fps on my GF2MX 32MB with random objects, probably a fill-rate limitation or texture memory thing.
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]
name "random-objects".
Put the random objects for each tile inside a top-level
ssgRangeSelector with a maximum range of 20km. This saves a lot of
range tests for distant tiles, and gives about a 10% framerate boost
on my card at 1000ft AGL (possibly more on faster cards).
