VTP Development Log, 1999
Changes per major release.
December 29, 1999
Enviro:
- When you choose "Derive texture from elevation", areas at sea
level (elevation 0) are now drawn as blue. However, this does not
extend to bodies of water that are not at sea level. This is a
simpler, but much less costly option than turning on the "Ocean
plane".
- New option "Road culture" makes the creation of stopsigns and
streetlights optional.
- Choice of LOD algorithm: you can now choose between Lindstrom-Koller
(previously the only option) and TopoVista. My implementation of
TopoVista is slower to initialize, faster to render, has fewer 'crack'
artifacts, and does not yet support tiled textures or undersea elevation.
- Known problems: the debug version may crash on exit in some cases, and the
release version may crash whenever it wants to.
TBrowser:
- New formats! You can now import GTOPO30, DTED0, CDF, and some
additional rare flavors of DEM. The CDF import has only been tested so
far on files output from the popular GMT toolkit.
- Support for undersea data - areas below sea level can be displayed,
merged, and exported.
- New operations - "Remove terrain above sea", "Convert Geographic -> UTM",
and "Fill in unknown areas". I used these feature to
successfully merge a low-resolution bathymetric dataset in geographic
projection with a high resolution above-sea elevation dataset in UTM.
I hope you find them useful as well!
- Many small UI improvements such as implementing "File New" to
clear all the loaded terrain, 'Del' to delete the selected terrain, and new
toolbar shortcuts to make moving around easier.
November 29, 1999
- This was the first official release under the VTP name