Humor Anything happening in the Orbiter development front ?

[Matias Saibene]

Specifically for the next releases, we're investigating into release methods to adequately distribute the planetary height maps and textures which make these new features work - these are expected to be on the order of a few hundred gigabytes, I understand.

Good preparation might involve clearing some space and securing some bandwidth...

I suspected: goodbye current computer, hello Cray Titan or Skynet.

Goodbye broadband, hello Google Fiber or Internet by particle accelerators.
My commentary is a bit exaggerated.

 

[Pipcard]

I currently have 376 GB of free space.

 

[MaverickSawyer]

550GB. I'm good to go! :lol:

 

[Pablo49]

I don't think storage space will be too much of an issue. HDD space is easy to come by. It's just getting it to computer.

 

[Loru]

I guess to address such large data sets Orbiter needs to be able to read larger than 4gb memory ? So Orbiter may be recompiled for x86-64 ? Otherwise a very efficient paging mechanism would be needed.

As far as I know, patch textures will be stored in separate .dds files rather than giant .tex files. Just think "surface tiles" covering all the planet. No need for >4gb data handling as you won't see all of it at once anyway.

Advantage is: you can alter particular area and you're not forced to repack giant tex files. Or distribute higher resolution of particular area, as patched won't have upper limit anymore. (ie you can even achieve 1cm/pixel if you want)

Any high-resolution areas will be served directly by the patch manager so base tiles will become obsolete.

Since Martin seems to be working mostly in Linux and the Orbiter core does not use DirectX, perhaps a version for Linux :hmm:

Still it uses WindowsAPI for dialogs for example. And many add-ons are using dialogs also (therefore windows API). Just throw them out?

 

[orb]

So Orbiter may be recompiled for x86-64 ?

That would be a completely new spaceflight simulator only using the same data base, but with all existing DLL based Orbiter modules incompatible with it (so Spacecraft and Multistage, too, until new 64-bit versions of them are made). I imagine people asking (demanding) in every OHM thread for 64-bit compatible versions of add-ons.

perhaps a version for Linux :hmm:

So a 3rd, new spaceflight simulator with another separate set of add-ons, unless the 64-bit version mentioned earlier completely changes its API / code base, to for example use CLI/Mono.