Grass is greener on the other side

"Vacation (n): something you don't realize you needed until a few weeks after you've recovered from it. by that time, it's too late." - I am taking a couple of weeks off going back home to Kenya . I have been really busy getting things organized at work and assasinating bugs in World Wind.

With some time in hand tonight I decided to try out VMWare + Debian 'Etchy". Coming from Gentoo, apt felt so much less configurable but faster considering I dont want to compile anything except the bare necessities on a VM. Strangely grass seems to be always greener on the other side of the fence when running Linux I always have a desparate urge to play games or code Worldwind, and while running pure windows I feel like making Ossim Qt work. Anyway with a VM handy I can indulge my whims. I finally got Ossim Qt compiled on Debian relatively painlessly and started grazing on the other side of the fence.

The new generation of WMS Browser

.NET WMS capabilities parsing being smoothened by Carbon Tools has allowed Worldwind WMS Browser to enter a new generation. WMS's can now be fetched and saved in the Worldwind catalog as any other Worldwind Tile Service layers. Thanks to withak(Erik Newman) for ironing out the last few bugs. Here is a screenshot of the latest incarnation of WMS showing the Demis World Map layers.

Water Rendering and Flooding Adelaide

Believe it or not, South Australia especially around Adelaide is one of the lowest parts in Australia. Though the mass scale flooding risks here are low, tsunami's are more likely near the Pacific Ring of fire, Gleneleg still gets water in the streets. So I decided to try out some of my new Water layer shaders on Adelaide. The results are in the screenshots.

The shader is a textured reflection map. Mesh deformation with waves and cubemap generation on the fly from the surrounding terrain and sky will give greater realism to the water.

Worldwind Java showing Globe

Finally Worldwind Java-JOGL version has a globe. I have been building and testing it in Eclipse, pending NASA's decision on the commit and Open Source interaction policy. Tom Gaskins is the lead on this and he does not take kindly to random meddling even on a small and insignficant scale as I found out when I submitted some trivial patches to WorldWindJ. My SVN access was promptly revoked and then restored after some pushing around from the Community and some sanity from Chris Maxwell.

Worldwind seems to be getting a really high profile within NASA. It may be even heading for the Mission Control Screens? Just speculation on my part at this point.

I have also been fiddling with the MingW Ossim and QGIS builds for a QT based multiflatform GIS/Remote Sensing Tool. Great vertical applications and solutions can be built using tools that are now on offer. Imagine an application, get some money together, it can be done in weeks.

Water Rendering

The coolest things to render are no doubt the elements - Water, Air , Fire , Earth and Spirit ( AI ?)

In Worldwind we have a tonne of Earth and Air so I decided to look into rendering some water using the mdxinfo water tutorial.

The basic tricks are surface vertex and texture map deformations using sine waves or gerstner waves and generation of reflection/refraction maps from surrounding terrain and clouds. Effects like those shown are what I am aiming for.