Maintenance Release. Release notes TBD.
Terrain Engine
The terrain engine (“MP”) has undergone many performance updates. We focused on geometry optimization and GL state optimization, bypassing some the OSG mechnisms and going straight to GL to make things as fast as possible.
MP has a new optional “incremental update” feature. By default, when you change the map model (add/remove layers etc.) osgEarth will rebuild the terrain in its entirely. With incremental update enabled, it will only rebuild tiles that are visible. Tiles not currently visible (like those at lower LODs) don’t update until they actually become visible.
Caching
Caching got a couple improvements. The cache seeder (osgearth_cache) is now multi-threaded (as it the TMS packager utility). The filesystem cache also supports expiration policies for cached items, including map tiles.
JavaScript
We updated osgEarth to work with the newest Google V8 JavaScript interpreter API. We also now support JavaScriptCore as a JS interpreter for OSX/iOS devices (where V8 is not available).
Terrain Effects
A new TerrainEffect API makes it easy to add custom shaders to the terrain. osgEarth has several of these built in, including NormalMap, DetailTexture, LODBlending, and ContourMap.
New Drivers
There is a new Bing Maps driver. Bing requires an API key, which you can get at the Bing site.
We also added a new LibNOISE driver. It generates parametric noise that you can use as terrain elevation data, or to add fractal detail to existing terrain, or to generate noise patterns for detail texturing.
Other Goodies