WSV3 2025 Next-Gen Terrain/Mapping engine

Paul

TheDopplerKid It's happening. It's only a matter of implementation time and effort.

Paul

Progress with smooth terrain imagery sampling/filtering and antialiasing. Using tri-linear filtering between the two nearest source texture grid levels + FXAA. This already looks great and might preclude the need to implement anisotropic filtering, at least for now.

Paul

First video preview (work in progress, many imperfections):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNN1FBSMJK8

MeteoLatvia

Paul Just watched the video and I'm blown away! It looks so super smooth even in the very early development stage as you say.

One question - around 0:42 in video I saw very beautiful and realistic simulation of Sun light shading - is it just for development version/testing or it is really intended? 🙂

NorthAlabamaStormChase

Outstanding work! This cannot be released soon enough...

Paul

MeteoLatvia It's indeed a simple placeholder sun as a simple dot product in the atmosphere scattering postprocess effect, however I am sure I'll do proper point-sprite-based sun and stars. Probably will wait until I have a flexible and customizable PNG sprite customization system, as that's a final touch. But the sun position itself is not a final touch: it will be a central mapping/terrain rendering feature to have dynamic night/day map styles based on correct astronomical or user-customizable sun position. This is my current intention and desire. I have not however done the research or proof of concept on this. But I know that the worst case scenario is it would be a non-default optional high-graphics option for day/night styling for faster GPUs.

The whole lighting aspect of terrain is completely unfinished - just doing very basic diffuse lighting here with no specular, ambient occlusion, etc.

Going to look really fantastic 3 months from now - hopefully I will have the vector GIS 3D-terrain-projected screen-space-extruded polyline rendering by then, where the vector mapping data lines follow the curve of the 3D terrain surface as seen in existing industrial TV broadcast weather graphics systems. Proof of concept shot of this on manually drawn simple line data is in the other thread.

MeteoLatvia

Paul Oh my, this looks great! Really - without anything I can already feel the power what that comes with all the 3D terrain and GIS system coming.

About the atmosphere scattering and effects - in my opinion it would be super eye-candy feature to have. It will add to the realistic look, and with combination of dynamic night/day map styles will look great. But I can agree - this may be as non-default option.

Paul, very best wishes and good luck into development, this product is shaping up to be real beast. 😉

P.S. Apologies for my overjoy, but this is all is great. 🙂

Paul

Happy to be progressing to vector/polyline aspects. For tactical use case in power-constrained performance-critical environment, it might be advantageous to set the mapping engine exclusively to vector mode, or at least, omitting all raster data except for compressed elevation used to terrain-project the lines and do hillshading/terrain colorization without imagery. The first picture below shows 3D terrain projected screenspace-extruded lines which follow terrain according to real-time adjustable elevation exaggeration slider. The new vector engine will use efficient vector tiles downloaded from server for lightning fast map loading and without the necessity to deploy large, wasteful, double-precision shapefiles. I am going to use highly efficient 16-bit or possibly even 8-bit tile-relative geometry indices projected on GPU for minimal memory bandwidth and vector tile download sizes. I also aim to create a flexible topology system behind the vector mapping which consolidates overlapping line segments between, e.g., state and county outlines. Already there is single-shapefile topological simplification and edge collapsing.

NorthAlabamaStormChase

Looks amazing Paul! Keep up the great work!

Paul

We will finally have a decent ocean. This is an initial low-effort pass to have something acceptable during the long multi-month upcoming period of focusing specially on the 3D GIS vector data rendering, e.g. terrain-projected polylines, labeling, etc. Looks great already compared to no ocean effect at all.

MeteoLatvia

Paul Wooow, this is just crazy! It looks super great even if it is still just early version and not polished. Paul, you manage to blow my mind with every of this teaser screenshot. 😃 It is so nice that you also included screenshot from Europe, because I wanted to see how it looks like in my region. I actually live in Latvia, which is also visible in the top-right side of image.

NorthAlabamaStormChase

Paul... this is too sweeeeeeeettttttttt.....

Paul

NorthAlabamaStormChase We will continue to see the spectacular benefits of my starting over from scratch. So much more is possible now that we are free of the structural limitations of the 2015-era first-generation product. The ocean is going to be one compelling graphical example.

shawnk101

A new ocean is something I always talked about Paul! Going to be nice to FINALLY see a new one!

Paul

Not only decent raster imagery/elevation global coverage with the proprietary Landsat dataset, but over Europe, should be no problem to have default vector mapping layers with at least country boundaries. I am sure low-res international primary roads also exists. We will have an excellent representation of Europe and other non-CONUS areas in the base mapping components. Everything will download compressed vector tiles and raster tiles from a centralized data streaming server, with full-space shapefiles only optionally present if the user wants to extend the mapping.

The second shot below shows how great the new screenspace-extruded line rendering is compared with traditional world-space method, a difference particularly notable at angled/perspective views. I am developing a very efficient 3D terrain line rendering pipeline using GPU compute shaders and compact vector tiles for this.

Paul

Further strides in GIS vector/polyline rendering and accelerated vector tile generation from input shapefiles. Going to have to spend multiple months in this area. Resurrected the experimental summer 2023 SDF line rendering offset-effects I had previously pictured some experiments with. Another cool little utility to aid myself in making these screenshots is a proper screenshot export feature - Ctrl+S automatically saves to configurable directory and clips to window rectangle. No file prompt window appears, for maximal convenience and minimal annoyance. It launches a Windows explorer window once containing the dedicated Screenshots folder in the user-specific AppData folder - similar concept to Android smartphone "screenshot" folder. We want this to be a convenient part of the experience. Also using JPG now with high quality/low compression which still massively reduces file size over PNG at little visual cost. An additional feature further enhancing convenience on the new embedded screenshots feature will be to detect if a Windows explorer window is already opened to the screenshots folder and not re-launch it if so.

MeteoLatvia

Paul This looks awesome! I think it would be real game changer to have so advanced GIS system, that already in development looks just amazing! Do you also have any photos from European side (e.g. Alps)? It would be great to see them too. 🙂

radioman10

Paul Love the screenshot protocol you’re establishing here for the screenshots go in a user-definable folder without having to define that each time. I assume screen recordings/videos will work the same? If so, excellent.

One note on this that I can see being helpful: maybe have a simple indicator (even as simple as a green checkmark or green dot) appearing for one or two seconds (in a status bar or even in the screenshot/video button?) letting the user know the screenshot saved successfully. If the program is pointing to a file directory that is no longer accessible or no longer exists (like a remote server as an example), display a red dot or a notification mentioning this.

Again, LOVE the idea of bypassing the file directory for every screenshot/video. That’s great.

radioman10

Paul Also, just noticed the JPG mention. Any way to allow the user to specify JPG or PNG instead?

OptimallyAxel

The fourth picture must be a radar image of a severe storm that absolutely hammered the Merrimack Valley once it really ate up all that instability. The fifth picture is just incredible and how much potential the terrain will really improve. Looks great!

Paul

OptimallyAxel Spot on. That is a L2 scan of the September 8th severe thunderstorm event, which ravaged Andover where I was at the time with convective wind damage, ironically, driving back to NH during the first week of development of WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst 2025. I said to myself while stuck on 495 it would make a great test dataset to use for radar graphics during development. I found it serendipitous that the most notable severe convective event within 20 miles of my Windham headquarters in the past few years coincided with my initial beginnings this past early September on the next-generation rewritten from scratch WSV3 product. Yes, I included the last shot to highlight the 3D terrain-projected lines and also the rendering feature of using a different/customizable line style where terrain-occluded (i.e. "behind" terrain).

Paul

MeteoLatvia I'm right on the cusp of whipping-up a basic UI, similar to what's in first-generation V6 Prototype, for basic shapefile import and line styling settings. Then I will be able to easily churn-out some cool international/Europe-focused mapping graphics as I'm sure Google will yield some free shapefiles I can drag-in. Right now I can only programmatically control this which is a pain, so to maximize efficiency, I will discipline myself to hold-off until I have a basic UI. This kind of discipline has been a common theme for me in the past 5 months because I know how cool very nearly accessible things are (such as volume rendering), but I know that I will be a position in X months' time to implement them more time-efficiently. So, given the extremely daunting amount of work I have created for myself in a timeframe maximally extending to 11:59pm on 12/31/2025, I have to be very tactical and efficient (just like the software itself) about development/coding prioritization.

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