Things that make you go hmmmm

[helo36]

I find it very amusing lately...everyone seems to claim that THEY were the ones to bring photofield technology to sims...

I just saw an add for G3 that says "From the people who brought Photofield technology to R/C Simulation"....I guess everyone who has photofield technology in the sims claims they created the technology....Don't get me wrong..not knocking anyone or any company..just find it amusing that the Big 3 are saying the same thing...or am I confused???...

Ken

[rutat]

Well, Photofield is a registered trademark Owner is Lightning Bolt Pix, Inc. of California. G3 shows the (tm) (should actually be an (R) but I digress). I assume it is licenced to them? PreFlight uses the term generically as I'm sure the others do. They can expect a letter. :)

[Flappers]

Ignore them all, it was my idea, mine mine mine!!! :D

[rutat]

On this side of the pond it is first to invent, not file.

[frontman]

I think the original Realflight did have a photofield view. It's been awhile since I owned it.

[ShuNut]

So who was 1st then ? after Flappers that is ???

[Daniel G]

FMS of course! :D

[Looooeeee!]

If you want to get real technical, Flying Corps Gold, the Win 95 WWI flight sim is probably the first to do this. They did the ground images directly from colorized (tm) B/W WWI observation photo fields, The image BMP for FMS's Islet .scn is done from an aerial photo of a tropical lagoon/island.

[Mr Rowl]

"Photofield technology" isn't about rendering terrain projecting photos onto the surface - the discussion here is about rendering complicated scenery using a small set of images placed around a fixed observer in a kind of optical illusion. The basic idea has been used in games long before 1995 and is called a skybox, and is just a static graphical representation - it doesn't interact with anything. On top of that each sim has done various "extra" stuff to make it useable to render the whole static scene - the most important things for R/C sims are
1. being able to superimpose shadows onto the background, assuming the ground is flat
2. being able to superimose shadows onto the background, for more complicated geometry
3. being able to occlude dynamic objects by part of the static scene (e.g. when you fly behing a house)
4. integrate lighting used in the original "skybox" photos into the rendering of the dynamic objects - basic stuff like making the light colour/direction match up, up to making shiny dynamic surfaces reflect the environment.
5. Extract collision information from the source photos and use them in some way to affect the physics

More too I'm sure. In addition, for each of these things there's probably a handful of technical solutions. So this is why each sim that says it's doing something original is probably right.