Anthony Bavuso (a.t.bavuso++at++larc.nasa.gov)
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 16:59:28 -0400
The end system will have several display panels driven from an Onyx2. For
example, one display for the artificial horizon, one display for the mode
control panel, throttle display, and several displays for the pilots out of
the cockpit views. This will be a very graphics intensive system where
every polygon counts.
So it seems to me that I have two options for creating flight instruments.
Option 1)
I have Multigen II and it has an instrumentation package where you can
generate open flight models of flight instruments easily. I can create the
instruments in Multigen and then in Performer put them into the scene graph
for rendering. The only problem is that the instruments are treated as 3D
objects and through the scene graph must go through all the culling and
transformations that other 3D objects require. But the flight instruments
do not require all the transformations and culling calculations, and it
seems a waste to do all the extra calculation when they not required.
Option 2)
I could use openGL directly from inside the draw process and therefore
directly control what calculations are performed on my instruments. This
seems performance wise to be the better choice. But if I go this route I
lose all the nice functionality of the Multigen and the scene graph. And as
a consequence my code becomes more complex and more difficult to write.
So the question is, is it worth the extra programming complexity to save on
the polygon count and to save on the unnecessary calculations on the
instruments by using openGL as opposed to using open flight and the scene
graph? How much will putting the open flight instruments in the scene graph
negatively affect performance?
I am sure that someone out there has written a flight simulation application
using Performer. How did you implement your flight instruments?
Do you'all have any suggestions, comments?
Thanks for you help.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 13:53:32 PDT