VTP Development Log, 1999

Changes per major release.

December 29, 1999

Enviro:

• When you choose "Derive texture from elevation", areas at sea level (elevation 0) are now drawn as blue.  However, this does not extend to bodies of water that are not at sea level.  This is a simpler, but much less costly option than turning on the "Ocean plane". 
• New option "Road culture" makes the creation of stopsigns and streetlights optional.
• Choice of LOD algorithm: you can now choose between Lindstrom-Koller (previously the only option) and TopoVista.  My implementation of TopoVista is slower to initialize, faster to render, has fewer 'crack' artifacts, and does not yet support tiled textures or undersea elevation.
• Known problems: the debug version may crash on exit in some cases, and the release version may crash whenever it wants to.

TBrowser:

• New formats!  You can now import GTOPO30, DTED0, CDF, and some additional rare flavors of DEM.  The CDF import has only been tested so far on files output from the popular GMT toolkit.
• Support for undersea data - areas below sea level can be displayed, merged, and exported.
• New operations - "Remove terrain above sea", "Convert Geographic -> UTM", and "Fill in unknown areas".  I used these feature to successfully merge a low-resolution bathymetric dataset in geographic projection with a high resolution above-sea elevation dataset in UTM.  I hope you find them useful as well!
• Many small UI improvements such as implementing "File New" to clear all the loaded terrain, 'Del' to delete the selected terrain, and new toolbar shortcuts to make moving around easier.

November 29, 1999

• This was the first official release under the VTP name