

whether clouds should be rendered with lighting and parallax effects.Parallax effects are also computed if the normal map contains an alpha channel encoding the inverse height of the Earth's relief whether textures should be rendered with lighting based on a normal map.whether textures should be procedurally enhanced with overlay textures to provide better apparent texture resolution.whether Earthview should take control of the atmosphere visuals and adjust them based on altitude.whether the cloud layer information should be used to render cloud shadows onto the terrain.whether a cloud layer should be rendered above the planet.Flying the Shuttle - Orbital Operations.Since there is then only a single object in the field of view, performance is generally very good provided that there is enough texture memory available. The quality of the terrain visuals then largely depend on the texture size used. It is based on projecting a simple textured sphere representing Earth into the scene using ray optics. In particular for orbiting spacecraft such as Vostok-1 or the Space Shuttle or even the UFO, neither rendering nor loading the standard terrain mesh is fast enough.Įarthview is an alternative orbital rendering engine for FlightGear designed to get credible visuals in these situations. While it is possible to use it for altitudes up to some 100 km, the performance impact becomes increasingly prohibitive and the visuals are not overly compelling. The default FlightGear terrain rendering strategy is designed for visuals from aircraft cruise altitude.
