Current goals / areas of development for VTP
2000-04-06

1. Vegetation/Area data tool - A
   • import and display potential vegetation area data from land use, vegetation type, etc.
   • merge that data, leveraging the other layers, into a single coverage database
   • read/write vegetation files (new format)
2. Terrain LOD renderers - A
   • paging of detail
3. Zoom in from space - A
   • if not an actual global coordinate system, at least the ability to render an initial fly-in to a textured sphere underneath the target terrain area
4. Formats - A-
   • support SDTS DLGs
   • support Terragen .ter
5. Buildings - B+
   • procedural construction: needs more parameters and specific demo detail
   • building tool needs to be able to specify those parameters
6. Water Areas - B+
   • support for rivers and lakes
   • improve DLG reader to extract areas
   • improve Builder to extrapolate and display both rivers and lakes as area data
   • read/write hydrography files (new format)
7. Roads - B
   • determine pavement extent from road network - this will allow parking lots and cul-de-sacs, as well as more accurate intersections
8. Vehicles - B
   • need to continue work on full articulation, motion, default behavior, indicator lights, etc.
   • not just cars - boats, planes, helicopters, etc.
9. Airports - B
   • ongoing - would be great to leverage the existing flight-sim hobbyist community as a source for airport and plane models
10. MRM (multi-resolution mesh) - B
    • integrate such code so that objects like cows, hand-modelled buildings, and vehicles do not waste our polygon budget
11. Smoke/steam - B-
    • for sulphur from vents, steam from lava hitting ocean, etc.
12. Water / Lava simulation - C
    • simulation of ripples in a still pond, flowing, and waterfalls
    • may be possible to change color, increase viscosity, and represent lava
13. Sky - C
    • improved coloring / haze
    • leverage newly discovered pages on accurate terrain lighting