Flightgear v3.4 scenery3/31/2024 If you are not running Rembrandt, you can switch the main rendering schemes runtime using the ‘Atmospheric Light Scattering’ (ALS) checkbox in the rendering dialog (blue circle in the image above) and explore what it does. Dependent on shader quality level, these effects may have quite a pronounced impact on the visuals. However, modern graphics cards allow to modify textures dynamically, or even create them on the fly by Procedural Texturing using shader effects. So the texture scheme selection governs things like the basic appearance of the terrain, the format the textures are internally stored in and the definitions where in the world certain textures should be used. The old ‘Global’ texture scheme uses one such set everywhere in the world, the ‘Global alternative’ scheme uses a different set, but the format the textures are stored in is dds rather than png, and the ‘Regional’ scheme selects different textures based on what part of the world you are in. Simply put, the texture scheme selects a set of texture sheets which are mapped to the various landclasses in the terrain, such that a forest is rendered as forest rather than as grass. The visuals you get to see of the terrain in Flightgear depend on texture scheme and rendering scheme being used. Thanks for your time! Some context for those interested – Go to the wiki page and report your experiences, ideally including the graphics card you have and the driver you’re using. – Change back to the texture scheme you like best If you see monochromatic colors or other rendering artifacts, your system may have problems with dds. – Do you see proper textures on the terrain (they may look different and may also not fit the location perfectly)? If yes, you’re fine. – Press ‘Okay’ – FG will reload the terrain – Under ‘Terrain texture scheme’, change the default ‘Region-specific’ to ‘Global alternative (DDS format)’ (see red circle) – Open the dialog under View -> Rendering If you are running on Linux and especially if you use an OpenSource graphics driver, please take 5 minutes to help during your next FG session: What would we need?įlightgear already provides the simple option to test a dds texture set. If there are no problems reported, FG will change defaults to txtures in dds format with the 3.4 release, and then phase out the use of png textures. The development team is concerned about making the Flightgear experience pleasant for all users, hence we would like to gather feedback how many users would be affected by a change in practice. Dependent on the specific hardware, this may or may not be a problem (modern graphics cards typically do not need the driver to process dds, for older graphics cards there are non-patented workarounds available which decompress the dds on the software level). However, the dds compression algorithm is patented, which means that it is not readily available for OpenSource graphics drivers used by Linux distributions. Practically all commercial simulations use dds for these reasons. – the resolution levels (‘mipmaps’) can be customized, allowing for some interesting effects at no performance cost no lower resolution levels have to be generated when the texture is used, hence it loads much faster into memory – dds stores all texture resolution levels, i.e. – compressed dds can be directly used by many graphics cards, reducing also GPU memory consumption – dds is a compressed format, hence the download size of the FG base package may be decreased This would offer a number of significant advantages: The FG development team is considering to switch the format for terrain textures from png to dds. Should Flightgear switch to dds texture format? What is this about?
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