Monday, May 7, 2007

Perfect Poles, Borrowed WMS Dialogs and Merging Icons




I will take a break from vaguely philosophical posts and write something useful. In a perfect example of Open Source cross pollination, ossimPlanetQt has borrowed the look and feel of the WMS Import funtionality from QGIS.

There is also another very desirable functionality of ossimPlanet I would like to transfer to World Wind, perfect poles using cube segmentation. Due to the use of triangle fins, World Wind (and Google Earth) end up with singularities at the poles, this is not the case in ossimPlanet. But I believe it will require a substantial overhaul of planet rendering to duplicate. Various alternate planet rendering techniques were tried by Chris at one point, but none was as simple as the UV sphere in use now.

Due to various behaviours expected from icons, World Wind had ended up with 3 distinct icons classes. Now they are happily merged together into one concrete class with all the functionality. Hope we did not miss anything.

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