Suburbazine The whole initial setup experience is going to be mind-blowing. The goal is, from dismissing the Windows SmartScreen popup to visible map tiles loading in 2 seconds. No installation process - a few extra tiny DLLs downloaded in the background on first start. WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst will run instantly on any Windows 8.1 or newer PC with zero VM restriction, opening the door to usage on Parallels or even possibly an eventual in-browser app streaming service.
The one catch is there can't be a free trial with working data, but only a static data graphics demo to confirm compatibility. I can solve this by adding an eventual very low cost "data pass" for 24 - 96 hour (or somewhere in that range) usage. This also allows people to use the product when only needed for severe events and not having to commit to a monthly sub.
Eliminating the real-time-data free trial allows the system to be far more generous and liberal everywhere else. It is an expectation to 1) rapidly switch devices and 2) leave up running indefinitely. The first-gen product licensing system requirement to remember to deactivate on old PC is unacceptable for tactical grade usage context. There will be a remote kill switch. The constant server communication is already part of the embedded design for streaming immediate push-based data updates.
The half-price product might be called "WSV3 Core Hazard Display". I am pushing to hopefully make that available months before December 2025, sort of a "soft launch". This will be 2D only and not have hardly any visual customization. With solid data and robust, field-tested floating licensing/web server infrastructure in place, I can finish the remaining aspects (not the least of which bringing back the 8x octomap 3D terrain globe rendering engine) for the full WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst release on the 10 year anniversary.
I have decided it is critical to perfect the core bandwidth/power optimized multiresolution GPU-accelerated geospatial raster streaming engine with Core Hazard Display first, and then finalize all other aspects for Tactical Mesoanalyst.
I am 99% sure the EXE size will be under 400kb. Stripped-out all the high-level, bloated Delphi runtime libraries and developed hand-written fast, low-level Win32 API wrappers for basic functions like file IO, HTTP/Websockets, and threading. The code is raw Pascal and not using modern inefficient object oriented garbage - no use of exceptions, no RTTI, no polymorphism, minimal heap allocations, no VCL UI (user interface now 100% GPU rendered inside graphics). It took me basically 15 years to realize how much value Sqlite offers over using the filesystem. Everything will be Sqlite database files. The simple app data folder will be hardcoded to C:\ProgramData\WSV3. It will contain very few files - big conglomerated and highly efficient Sqlite DB files which gives performance and even EXE file size benefits, lessening amount of needed code in certain areas. There is a ridiculous amount of overhead on NTFS and modern OSs with how the 2017 GIS engine in WSV3 Professional, for instance, is caching hundreds of thousands of small little vector tile files. This makes copying/backing-up data folders a nightmare and introduces huge runtime overhead.
Currently getting into the core aspects of multiresolution tiled raster data streaming/compression, SIMD optimized GPU block compressed texture encoding, throughput maximization of multithreaded tile ingest for real-time 8x simultaneous independent moving camera map view render, and eventually hierarchical compression on the mapping background data to save maximal bandwidth.