Today we are going to talk about upcoming improvements to the graphics engine for the Virtual Radar 3D.The current graphics engine uses a large number of small individual image files stored on the hard disk to make up the world. When the program starts it loads all of them into the graphics memory and then shows the world in a manner similar to the picture on the left. An example of the sort of earth you can see when viewing aircraft in the UK is given by the red square.
This has some very useful features, for example it enables you to use the radar with a textured map of the world while away from an Internet connection. However, since it is loading the entire worlds textures in one go, it can cause a performance hit on machines that have lower powered graphics cards. Also many graphics cards are limited to a maximum texture size of 1024x1024 pixels. This limits the maximum resolution for the textures that can currently be used.
The new graphic engine updates we are working on, use a Planet Section Manager to split the world up and dynamically load areas that are visible. This splits the world rectangle into 4 smaller rectangles and then splits those and so on. It decides where to split them and how much based on the position of the camera. This means that you can zoom into anywhere in the world and the amount of resources used drawing places in the world where you are not viewing, is enormously reduced. Not only this but since it can split the rectangles much smaller, it can then load 1024x1024 pixel images over a smaller area making the world appear in much higher detail.
The next problem comes with getting the images to texture these tiny rectangles. For this we have decided that keeping images on the hard disk is important but we also want to allow the software to use WMS servers to download much higher resolution images from the Internet. An example of the quality of images we plan to be able to use is shown in the picture of Heathrow Airport to the left.
Offline mode is also important to us, so we will be keeping a copy of these images on the hard disk for you to use when you are mobile.
Finally we are also intending to implement an option of a day/night cycle to improve realism, although there are a few problems with this in the current development build so it is disabled for the moment.
Here is an image of the world from our development build.Aurora Development Team