What's New in VirtualGeo 7.0
The latest release of VirtualGeo brings you many enhancements and technical innovations and is centered around four major capabilities:
- Performance and stability on all platforms supported by VirtualGeo
- Interoperability : Marine chart, MetaFlight, APP6-C symbology, etc.
VirtualGeo 7.0 offers also many other enhancements : see here for more details.
Performance and stability
VirtualGeo support many different devices with different computing and graphics power for many years. The focus of this release has been to improve the performance for the whole “spectrum” from smartphone to graphics workstation. Gain varies from at minimum 30% to 300% depending on the workload and feature uses. The efforts have been made on removing completely the fixed pipeline and improving the shader pipeline for low-level stuff. Moreover, a rework has also been done on terrain rendering pipeline, which improves in particular workload such as intervsibility.
Performance is a key point for VirtualGeo, but we should not sacrifice stability. Our test framework has been reworked from the ground before doing any performance work to avoid any regressions on all devices, OS, and windowing system supported by VirtualGeo.
Interoperability : Marine chart, MetaFlight, APP6-C symbology, etc.
A strong point of VirtualGeo is its support of different formats in different domains. This release brings its share of new features to this level:
- S52 symbology for marine chart integration into your geospatial applications. The S52 symbology describes precisely how to represent the S57 data, the standard format for marine chart.
- Support for MetaFight format used in simulation domain for complex 3D synthetic environment
- The addition of the APP6-C symbology which complements the existing support of the APP6-B
- A first preview of OGC CDB support, a standard used in simulation 3D domain to describe the 3D synthetic environment
In details
VirtualGeo SDK
- Performance : Improvements on feature element batching
- Performance : rework on terrain rendering with gain form 30% to 300%
- Performance : rework on shader pipeline and removal of fixed pipeline with gain from 20% to 70%
- No more dependencies on Qt for Java and C# version
- Qt dependencies is now clearly separated for C++ application in its own module, the core is free from any Qt dependencies
- C# interoperability is improved with the native support of WPF windowing system through a directx backend
- Loading of data from disk is much more faster thanks to a new cache system for GenuineLayer
- The addition of the APP6-C symbology which complements the existing support of the APP6-B
- Better performance and support for SVG icon for IconStyle
- New styling features :
- Anchors and label decoration on center and top
- Color mask on texture for Surface Style
- Improvemenent on feature editors to better work with touch screen
VirtualGeo Studio
- CDB and marine chart import
- Connection to secured external web services
- Refresh of network layers cache data
- Support of ED50 projection
- A new server view to manage data on VirtualGeo Server
VirtualGeo Server
- Upgrade to latest version : OS, database
- Improvement for huge vector import with a new import pipeline
- Performance improvements for huge vector database visualisation
VirtualGeo Web
- All performance improvements from SDK, especially on OpenGL ES support
- A new backend for visualisation based on Leaflet to support older devices
- Performance improvements on data loading for Web Assembly