General Question CIGI ?

[aSIM]

Could Orbiter be made CIGI compatible?

 

[n72.75]

CIGI?

 

[Urwumpe]

I think it is about this one:

Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI)

www.prepar3d.com

I doubt it is possible to adapt Orbiter to support this standard in any kind of configuration. It seems to be very aircraft specific.

 

[aSIM]

it's not so much aircraft specific, although it is used mostly with aviation simulation. It can be adapted to any form of simulation or vehicle if that model is ported into the CIGI software. It is however used for creating imagery or the out-of-cockpit view, the world view from a simulated environment/vehicle. But the software needs to be compatible with CIGI standards. I wonder if that's something that could be achieved with Orbiter? Or what it would cost $ to achieve that? doing so would definitely open up some very interesting avenues. And if Martin's original motivation for this platform was to inspire, it could definitely be put to good use.

 

[Urwumpe]

it's not so much aircraft specific, although it is used mostly with aviation simulation. It can be adapted to any form of simulation or vehicle if that model is ported into the CIGI software. It is however used for creating imagery or the out-of-cockpit view, the world view from a simulated environment/vehicle. But the software needs to be compatible with CIGI standards. I wonder if that's something that could be achieved with Orbiter? Or what it would cost $ to achieve that? doing so would definitely open up some very interesting avenues. And if Martin's original motivation for this platform was to inspire, it could definitely be put to good use.

I doubt its a financial problem, it is just that we would need to support many more standards for it, that we currently don't.

Maybe, a prototype CIGI visualization client could work, that simply outputs the simulation state to a CIGI image generator. But even that would for example require translating the orbiter meshes and visuals into the SimObject standard. But it would maybe work without messing with Orbiters architecture.

And first problem of all: I have no such image generator around to even imagine how I could test this.

Second problem I foresee: This image generator won't work on any other planet except Earth. There is no Mars data for them, no lunar definition. Possibly it won't even like vehicles flying higher than typical airliner territory, because the renderer was never meant to render Earth from space.

Third: I only spent a limited number of seconds on this, but I didn't find any publicly available definition of this standard. Maybe the Sourceforge link to it contains more information. Working with a older version or incomplete information about the standard is possible but could lead to annoying incompatibilities and make testing much harder than needed.

So, from my perspective, unless you now say something really smart and enlightening, its currently impossible to realize.

 

[aSIM]

Bohemian Interactive Sim's Blue IG covers runway to low earth orbit, that's what got me thinking.

unless you now say something really smart and enlightening

It's Saturday night, I have to take a break from that...

 

[Urwumpe]

Bohemian Interactive was also behind "Take on Mars", if I remember correctly.

 

[Sbb1413]

This image generator won't work on any other planet except Earth. There is no Mars data for them, no lunar definition. Possibly it won't even like vehicles flying higher than typical airliner territory, because the renderer was never meant to render Earth from space.

In other words, CIGI is good for LEO missions like Gemini, Mercury, Shuttle but bad for BLEO missions like Apollo and Artemis.