Kirk I appreciate how you can perceive the development tension I have to face between seeing really cool, really ground-breaking things sooner and of total overall development efficiency for a real-world releasable product. It has required a lot of discipline to do things in the sequential order which minimizes retroactive wasted time. For instance, last month when I completely gutted the traditional VCL/Windows components UI and opted for fast, no-bloat, GPU-renderered, immediate-mode UI for the entire application, that was a major investment in the future but requiring me to take several steps back. I had to recreate the multi-map, dynamic resolution rendering engine with a new immediate mode vs retained API for better performance - basically redoing 6 weeks of work from the fall in 3.
Another great annoyance you can see is I've had to take a step backwards on the background imagery (the beautiful terrain screenshots from winter) and live with only colorized 3D terrain elevation data because the system I hacked together in January just to get basic 3D terrain imagery up on the map was not satisfactory. In particular it was limited just to that static mapping data, yet in the past two weeks I've designed the release-ready equivalent, which will abstract both real-time generic raster data and also mapping data into the same engine. So it could be next month until I even have that aspect back, but then it will be far more visually impressive, with the ability to blend multiple raster datasets (for the base mapping) and also to display arbitrary weather datasets projected on the terrain with the imagery as well.
I need to stay the course of correct sequential order because this minimizes waste between now and release in 17 months, and maximizes the content able to be delivered on release.
There will be a large acceleration in rate of graphically discernible progress after a few more months of low-level engine work. For instance, my work the entire last week has been within non-visual experimental console apps for certain systems to be integrated into client. This is for a deployment system that will blow people away at the immediacy of first time program launch with ZERO installer and seamless invisible automatic background updates like a web browser. The economic rationale for doing something like that now is it makes my development more efficient, because I am testing on multiple PCs including an NVIDIA RTX 4060 laptop, so by doing the boring work first and the exciting work second, the exciting work can happen at a faster rate. I've encountered many cases where something beneficial for myself for testing/development has a direct equivalent to end user convenience, such as not having to go through the hassle of manually downloading/transferring/installing files when wanting to test a new internal build.
Again thank you so much for sharing my faith in how jaw dropping what we will be looking at in 2025 will be. After the new raster tile ingest/composition system I plan to start in around 2 weeks has some progress, we will have another round of excitement-building screenshots that show the promising power of the new 3D mapping engine.
