Comments on: Glass Objects

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:42:00 +0000

Nils - it doesn't. Glass objects can ONLY be set for ATTACHED objects because it's part of the AIRCRAFT, not part of the OBJECT! So....this can't solve the larger-sim translucency issues with clouds, rotors, etc.

cheers
ben

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:36:00 +0000

Hi,
How does this feature relate to the issue of obj rotors and propellers 'erasing' clouds in the sky? Would these be drawn after the clouds if declared as glass?

Thanks,
Nils

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:15:00 +0000

Anonymous: sorry I meant to say - you duplicate the geometry in the one glass object, keeping the inward facing glass earlier in the list of triangles. You don't need to use two objects.

Dan: no. The "glass" capability works for airplanes because airplanes are basically objects as a whole in themselves - extending translucent draw order to all scenery globally is a much, much more complex problem, because it requires correct sorting of all sceney elements against all other scenery elements. We may have this some day, but there is certainly no way to extend what I did for airplanes out into the scenery system - there's no general purpose mechanism, only something specific to airplanes.

Reflections have similar problems: the reflections against the water are somewhat special-cased. We may have general purpose reflections some day, but if we do, they'll require different code and a lot more complexity; the water gets a huge advantage for being relatively flat. (For GL nerds, this means they can be reflected with a single reflection, not a cube map!)

Color - maybe I don't understand the feature request, but my general reaction to color is always the same: use the texture. If we have reflections we may have some kind of tinting some day, but certainly for the current lighting model, the diffuse color should be managed with the texture, because that is orders of magnitude faster than any kind of attributes.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:11:00 +0000

Not entirely related to cockpit windows, but would it be possible to extend this feature and allow scenery designers to define an area on a model, a number of faces, with attributes that define transparency, color and most importantly, reflections?

By being able to add reflections, much like the beautiful water in v9, it would add a lot to the dynamics of the sim world, something that is not possible to achieve with texture baking on such a large scale. If scenery designers use this feature sensibly, it should not be to much of a drag on the system.

What is your thought on such a feature?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:55:00 +0000

When you say “pairs” of objects, same object duplicated with normals flipped on one of them? Two separated objects? and what about glass that is say 80mm thick, (and the inside edges are visible?