Since September I have ruminated on the idea of building a traditional 2D rectangular map rendering mode into WSV3 Tactical Mesoanalyst 2025. It would doubtlessly benefit the first two of the four major driving use cases which I explained in the early October post.

I was initially disfavoring attempting this before release, but now I am more strongly considering it.

The argument is simple: 3D globe rendering requires more rendering performance than 2D rendering, so merely keeping the 3D loaded in memory for instant switching but rendering the 2D instead will save power. This is easier for me to implement than a heavier system that attempts to transition resource loading/streaming between 3D and 2D modes in an attempt to also save less memory. That would be difficult and unwieldy, especially because memory savings aren't really that important when measured by power consumption (the tactical/in-field-friendly requirement) as compared to saving in rendering computation, and because the 3D rendering datastructures are already highly efficient.

This feature would be integrated within the multi-map system so users could arrange any combination and positional arrangement of visible maps as either 3D globe or 2D flat.

The biggest benefit is again rendering performance (no memory savings, as 3D map would be fully paged in background with identical logic), which could be meaningful on older hardware or when on-battery compared to 3D. Namely, the 2D map would allow for omission of the highly dense near-pixel-size triangle mesh the terrain engine has to maintain in uniform detail across the screen for terrain. Testing on my old 2013 laptop with embedded graphics, this creates significant overhead. When I set elevation exaggeration to 0 on that machine, which transitions to a very sparse triangle mesh since it is 2D, the performance is surprisingly great and holds around 45FPS. This proves the 2D map mode could have great value.

It will also enable creation of model graphics that appear more similar to the static images people share online from websites.

What are your impressions on the value of having a 2D map rendering mode? How often would you use it?