sky rendering

[alex25]

while playing with yet another track conversion, i discovered something i find interesting about the way vdrift renders the sky (horizon in particular). it looks like (and i haven't looked at the code yet) the horizon model gets projected outward from the origin. now, this this doen't really make any difference when the track is placed near the origin, but when the track is offset from origin by a large amount you end up with the horizon being projected way up in the sky. for this particular track i ended up centering the horizon on the origin and then it rendered fine but i was wondering how hard it would be to implement projecting the horizon outward (perpendicular that is). i guess that would imply the need to do some kind of offset translation for the model and then project it.

another area where vdrift lags behind the other simulators when rendering the horizon is the relative flag. basically, instead of projecting the horizon on the sky, we can mark it as relative to the viewpoint position. how hard would it be to implement this? i think this would also improve the frame rate, as the objects behind the horizon won't get rendered and then we'll also gain the ability to simulate various visibility conditions (or rainy days the clouds/horizon are closed in, sunny days are spaced out).

the track in question is racer nurburgring (http://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.cfm...rdschleife) i will probably not check it in for the time being (we already have a version and for this one we'll probably need to get permission to convert it) but i want to play with it for a while as it is a lot more realistic. if only rfactor would work under wine.

--alex--