FGFS Photo Gallery (v0.00 - v0.7.9)

These are some images that document the historical development of the project. They show aspects of the project in it's early stages, and they show some of the early features we were working on. The images are presented in reverse cronological order. The further down you go on the page, the earlier the vintage of the picture.

Runways

Work has begun on adding runway markings. Precision, non-precision, and visual marking schemes will be supported as well as concrete, asphalt, dirt, and turf surface types.

Our initial approach to drawing runway lines is to split the runway up into sections and apply the proper texture to that section. This way a huge variety of runways can be constructed with a relatively "few" number of textures.

Approach to KLAX showing new concrete runway textures.
Precision runway markings at KMSP (Minneapolis, MN)

Clouds

Sure, these aren't quite the 3D clouds of "Fly!", but they still look very nice and have a minimal impact on frame rates.

Cloud layers and cloud texture experiment.
View from the southern side of Seattle looking to the north-west across Puget Sound with the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

Looking down at Wizard Island in the center of Crater Lake through a thin layer of clouds.
Simple cloud example.

Scenery Work

I have begun an overhaul of the current scenery system to facilitate adding things like lakes, rivers, urban areas, other land use areas, and eventually streams and roads. I finally got tile edge matching to work so I have added some new images. Please note that the frame rate shown in these images is misleading. I have a 3dfx voodoo-2 and to take a screen shot I have to flip the card into "in-a-window-hack" mode which kills frame rates.

Most recently, I have added "urban" areas.

A nice shot of a snow capped Mt. Rainier in Washington state.
A view of Crater Lake taken from the north-east.

South Lake Tahoe.
Provo, Utah as viewed from across the lake.

Urban area and Ocean a bit south of KLAX.
juneau

Looking past Juneau towards the lake and Glacier.
Looking down runway 04 of E81 (Superior, AZ.)

Ranger Creek ... not all airports are created equal.
Lopez Island in Puget Sound (Washington.) This shot is looking towards the west and you can see the sun setting.

Lopez Island looking towards the north. You can see a runway on Blakely Island just to the north of Lopez Island.
San Jan Island in Puget Sound. On final to what I believe is Friday Harbor.

A shot from a bit south of Prince William Sound, AK.
And another image from the same area...

hydro.gif

Here are some screen shots from the old scenery system (without lakes and rivers.)

A detailed high altitude view of the Grand Canyon.
A hazy day at the Canyon.

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon.
A wire frame image showing an example of how the terrain is tesselated. If you look closely you can see that polygon size is quite variable. Terrain areas of greater complexity require a finer mesh to maintain a preset level of accuracy. Also note, the moon is hiding below the surface, but is exposed because of the wireframe rendering.

Here are some additional interesting snap shots hilighting various aspects of the Flight Gear scenery.

A view of AZ38 which is on the rim of the Grand Canyon.
A view from the top of a mountain south west of KSAD (Safford, AZ.)

A view from the ground near KTUS (Tucson, AZ.)
Texturing experiment. Eric Mitchell is the designer of the initial textures used for testing.

Here's one of the Grand Canyon with a rock face texture. I know this looks funny, but I was just experimenting here.
A more reasonable high altitude desert scene.

And another.

Night shots

Here are some snap shots which show the night sky. The Sun, Moon, stars, and planets are all rendered in their correct position in the sky. Flight Gear has a large star data base so the stars (and planets) are rendered with correct magnitude (brightness.) Also, the moon is rendered in the correct phase.

Full textured moon - Durk Talsma has done some excellent work texturing the moon. This snapshot was taken by William Riley.
Moon on 15 Aug 1999 showing the correct phase, placement, and orientation in the sky.

$moon-tex$
Textured moon - Here's another image that shows the moon at a different phase.
A nice evening shot of the Big Dipper.

Another evening shot showing the Southern sky.

HUD and Instrument Panel Work

New instrument panel work by David Megginson.

panel1.gif hori.gif

HUD Example - Michele America and Charlie Hotchkiss have been putting a lot of work into creating a flexible, configurable HUD. This image shows the current state of the HUD and was taken from KSAD (Safford, AZ.)
Zoom - Here I get out the old 300mm zoom lens and hold it really steady ... can you see those big horn sheep?

HUD Example - An older image.
Another older HUD shot.

And another.
And another showing a bit more terrain.

The Sky

A nice pre-sunrise moon crescent. In any sim you'd just expect the moon to be in the corrent place in the sky with the correct phase ... right?
Early Dusk. The sun has just set, but the sky is still glowing. Stars aren't quite out yet.

Later Dusk. The sun has set and the stars are beginning to appear, but the sky is still not completely dark.
Night (with the Moon.) Here is an example of the moon in the right place in the sky with the correct phase.

Haze at the horizon - This images demonstrates my first attempt at making a nice sky that transitions into haze at the horizons. It should be mostly straight forward to make a particlar side of the sky brighter or add a pink glow on one side to make nice sunsets and sunrises.

Sunsets

A nice sunset - This images demonstrates the pinkish orange glow in the sky that builds as the sun gets lower in the sky. If you could only pan around (and you can if you are running the binary) you would see that the pink fades and the sky gets darker as you look towards the other side of the sky. OpenGL is really, really cool. :-)
Sunset over the Grand Canyon.

Smooth Terrain

The following images shows how the terrain is smoothly lit underneath the texture maps.

Here's an example of smooth shading.Surface normals are specified on a per-vertex basis, and OpenGL interpolates shading across the triangle for a nice smooth effect. Notice the mountain in the distance that is barely visible through the nice smooth haze. :-)
Another example. If you look closely, you'll notice that this image has some display artifacts at the horizon ... eventually these will get cleaned up.

Irregular Terrain Gridding

Flight Gear uses sophisticated irregularly gridded terrain. Irregular grids are able to achieve the same detail level as a regular grid, but with 4-6x fewer polygons. We use a tool called Triangle written by Jonathan R Shewchuk (Jonathan_R_Shewchuk@ux4.sp.cs.cmu.edu) to connect the dots into a Delauney triangulation.

irregular1.gif irregular2.gif

Miscellaneous Images

A very detailed regular grid of the mesa-e area. Current versions of FG use an irregularly gridded terrain. Irregular grids should be able to achieve the same detail level with 4-6x fewer polygons.

Another very detailed regular grid.

A photo of a real Navion taken at a local airport.

Real versus Virtually Real

These images compare a real photo with an image generated by flight gear.