Farewell Thorsten! (A.K.A I take your word on this)

[IAHM-COL]

Farewell Thorsten! (A.K.A I take your word on this!)

I'm sorry, I've reached the point where I no longer enjoy looking into the
forum or joining mailing list discussions. I'm going to just *not*
participate in discussions, answer questions, fix bugs, or do
documentation etc. for a while.

Gene - it's not your fault in particular, it's just... one discussion of a
particular kind too many.

I've actually spent a few days of my life trying to figure out whether we
can have clouds generated by numerical integration over a true 3d
distribution. The answer is no. and I know of a few good math reasons why
this scales how it does. Last time I checked, FSX had pretty much our
cloud technology (rotated stacks of billboards). Last time I checked, REX
had pretty impressive 2D cloud textures - but the 3d clouds seemed to work
like ours. I know some people have used Perlin 3d noise - but that's not
going to result in Cu clouds, it only works for some cloud types.

I might not up to date with everything (it's been two years at least since
I dealt with clouds), but I'm not going to spend hours verifying what you
say and how other renderers actually generate clouds.

If you (or anyone else) knows how to code fast 3d clouds which don't rely
on billboards, you're welcome to do it, and I'll happily port the shader
to ALS and insert the clouds into AW. Otherwise it's just not helpful.

It costs 5 minutes to write a quick claim how we *should* be able to do
something and how FG is really on a bad way if we don't do something
(plenty of forum posts along these lines) See - what we usually see in
stunning videos of XY is binary assets - texturing work, high-quality
meshes - we don't really see *technical* aspects of how it's done, and we
most definitely don't see where it fails, and if we'd use the same
techniques on FG terrain mesh and textures, it'd still largely look like
FG terrain mesh and textures and not like super-fancy video X.

It usually takes a few hours for me to verify what the rendering
background of a feature shown in screenshot XY actually is and how it is
done, lots of words to explain it once I understood it, usually nobody
likes the information why we can't do something easily because we. unlike
the other renderer, are committed to some procedure or format, and
actually coding some super-fancy graphic feature may be a months of my
life. And I'm at the point where I am simply tired.

So, Gene - you win, my assertion is demonstrably wrong - but I can't do
it anyway. Happy?

Stuart has tried impostors before (the code is to my knowlegde still in),
I've tried a couple of other techniques over the times which also don't
work - in my humble opinion, the main deficiency of our clouds is
texturing work (which is limited by the fact that I did most of it, and
I'm not good at it). If someone actually knows how to make it better and
not just that we should be able to - please go ahead.

In a similar vein, there's hundreds of absolutely cool effects renderer XY
has - which we all don't, unless someone actually figures out a way to
make them work in our framework with enough performance left. Everyone
happy now?

I'm going to focus for a few weeks on things I actually like, finish the
work on the Shuttle avionics and perhaps tinker again with my expolanet
simulation code. If there's rendering or weather related bugs, they'll
just have to wait. There's the search for the next FG location in the
forum - anyone feel free to take over and make a poll, I won't bother any
more. I think if no one does anything we default to Prague (LKPR).

See you in a few weeks,

* Thorsten

[IAHM-COL]

I'm sorry

Don't be

See you in a few weeks

Maybe make it years?

[KL-666]

Come on Israel, do not make a victory fest out of this. To me it looks like a sad story. Probably someone had a good chat with him, with a cup of tea but without the biscuits. Obviously the man could not handle it.

Kind regards, Vincent

[IAHM-COL]

Don't take I am doing a victory fest.

But I totally agree with Thorsten taking himself some weeks off. Besides, as far as I get from his words he is going to concentrate on things he really like, such as the SpaceShuttle internals, that as opposed to come confrontational to everyone about everything.

That sounds like a great deal. We get to enjoy his great skills as a coder, without dealing with his interpersonal skills on the forum or the "list".

In that order of ideas, is such a win win, that if he wants to make it permanently, you wont see me sad.

[KL-666]

I would not expect too much of it. In Thorstens absence others may take over his role (i know a few capable), only to prove (in a bent way) that it was not Thorsten making the problems, but the visitors of the forum. If that happens there is no gain to the positive going to happen on that forum whatsoever.

Kind regards, Vincent

[SHM]

YAY!

I would not expect too much of it. In Thorstens absence others may take over his role (i know a few capable), only to prove (in a bent way) that it was not Thorsten making the problems, but the visitors of the forum. If that happens there is no gain to the positive going to happen on that forum whatsoever.

True

[bomber]

Brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat....

Luckily it's not Gene's fault.... but may I say WTFG Gene!
Please do share your secret.

But a quick reality check....he's likely to be back before my ban runs out

[bomber]

I would not expect too much of it. In Thorstens absence others may take over his role (i know a few capable), only to prove (in a bent way) that it was not Thorsten making the problems, but the visitors of the forum. If that happens there is no gain to the positive going to happen on that forum whatsoever.

Kind regards, Vincent

My concern would be that people now actually believe they're incapable of doing anything without him

Unfortunately ( as you probably have seen on the mailing list yourself ) Thorsten is taking a break. Hopefully we can get this to work without him, until he's back.

This would be an even worse scenario...

[IAHM-COL]

https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic. ... 15#p295237

Unfortunately ( as you probably have seen on the mailing list yourself ) Thorsten is taking a break. Hopefully we can get this to work without him, until he's back.

This would be an even worse scenario...

I miss your point here bomber.
What's so challenging of making a poll that we need Thorsten Genius to make this work. And how would, if succeed to make a poll for "next default airport" be a worse case scenario?

Ultimately, I still think, in respect to default airport, FG is wasting scarce core-dev resources there. It would be better to just #KEEPKSFO and let the core developers concentrate on fixing bugs (as oppose to implement big problems, or attempt at removing consoles), and that being a better way to spend their time that attempting at move all config files required to change where an airplane launches by default.
This also brings the problem of making basic documentation for the most newbie rather obsolete. Did not they went all the way to re-write the "first steps" optimized for Barcelona?
But that's all obsolete now, since the newbies get their aircraft popping up thousands of miles Soutwest, in the Gabelas of Rio.

#KEEPKSFO would allow to simply concentrate efforts in real critical things. Specially the efforts o the real critical people.

Furthermore, there is the additional interesting question around this:
Is "changing default scenery" encouraging massive development of chosen areas?

So far. NO. Strong and bold: NO.

Barcelona was 95% as developed as it came accross for FG2016.2. Rio was 100% as developed as it came accross on FG2016.3
Nothing new was made in terms of scenery development for the release: they just packaged different content (to KSFO) into the release.

Catalanoic did make a collection of new statics, here and there, around the new default areas, and push that to terrasync: But certainly he could have done the same without the added Core-Crazyness.

Look, the reason this is so clear, is that the pole question is: what place is good enough now to become default scenery. Clearly no one is targetting: What place can development focus on. For that, I claim, the FG festival is way more succesful.

[bomber]

the point I was making wasn't about default airport but about the attitude can we survive or develop without Thorsten, or even should we just not bother and wait the few weeks until he comes back... if this attitude takes hold it's just gonna feed into his big ego trip.