Re: Reducing airports polygon count

TerraGear developers discussions <[email protected]> writes:
>Dale E. Edmons wrote:
>
>
>> Would it be fairly easy to reduce the polygon count of airports?  
>> Reducing the polygons in the terrain was fairly easy but the airport 
>> count is still too high  for my application (converting to SPX-200 on 
>> two of our full flight simulators).  I'm still working out a few bugs 
>> in my conversion so I haven't looked too closely yet, but it should be 
>> somewhere in TerraGear/src/Airports/GenAirports.  Large airports 
>> currently cause rhe visual system to abort due to timeout caused by 
>> overload as soon as the airport tries to come into view.
>
>
>
>If it's a load time issue, you may also need to be concerned about the 
>number of runway lights.

I haven't even added the lights yet!  :(
>
>
>A really quick/crude hack would be to simply eliminate all the 
>taxiways.  That would drop your polygon count down substantially.  

Too crude I think.  My primary intention of using FGFS scenery is to provide a
base which a modeler can modify and turn in to a flyable (if not certifiable)
scene.
That being said I'd like to be able to display the scene without modification
to judge
what needs to be changed.  The textures are less critical and won't port very
well.  This sounds like a better way to go, though it may be more difficult and
require more modification away from the CVS code.
>
>Runways are divided up into smaller chunks so that we can properly apply 
>the various texture pieces which together form the whole runway.  
>Without changing the texture scheme. there's not much you can do about 
>reducing the number of poly's used for the runways.

The ends aren't much of a problem, what about the middle where long stretches
are of the same material, especially if I eliminate markings.
>
>
>It would be interesting to hear how your IG natively models 
>airports/runways.  How do they build/draw the runway numbers and other 
>markings.  Are they part of the texture, or are they overlayed as 
>separate polygons?
>
The runway's are polygons--often one rectangle on these old systems.  (This
is one thing I'm trying to change and am happy that FGFS uses more accurate
runway modeling.)  The stripes etc.. are polygons on top of the runway.  The
textures essentially modify the color of the base polygon to provide things
like skid marks in the landing zone.
>
>You could always rewrite the airport generator to use a different 
>scheme. :-)

Easy for you to say.  :)   I guess I'll take a more serious look after I
finish debugging the stuff I just ported from FGSD.  Its kind of neat
seeing your scenery on a full flight sim, even at reduced polygon
count and (currently) poor texturing.  ;)
>


Dale
>
>Curt.
>
>
>-- 
>Curtis Olson        http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
>HumanFIRST Program  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
>FlightGear Project  http://www.flightgear.org
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