Hi, I am Redrobes and I am from the south west part of the UK. I am a programmer doing a lot of graphics work - esp OpenGL and have written some apps which i'll talk about in a mo... I am also a community leader of the Cartographers Guild where we all make maps - mostly 2D but some 3D stuff also. Some of the members work there is exceptional. I am also an admin at Me-DEM which is the middle earth digital elevation modeling project.
I have written ViewingDale which to me seems like a parallel project to this one in every way except that it is in 2D. Its a pan and (deep) zoom interactive map browser with seamless transition through the 2D maps and icons that it shows. Its also networked so that you can play RPG games through in as a "virtual table top" or VTT, in real time with chat etc. So you can check out that on its website or go and see a you tube vid like this:
Incidentally that video is a collection of maps from the Cartographers Guild community driven world map.
Next up is an application I wrote for terrain synthesis called GeoTerSys. Its unreleased since its a command line driven terrain scripting language and on the whole I discovered that people found it too hard to write scripts for it. It is multi processor, quite quick and powerful tho but even I as its writer would say its not a barrel of laughs to use. Its main aim is top calculate fluid flow over terrain so that it models rain, rivers, snow, glaciers etc and generates some reasonably authentic erosion for it.
Finally, and I think this where the beef is, as an admin of Me-Dem a small group of us are trying to model the terrain of Middle Earth to a tremendously accurate degree. Our member 'Monks' uses Global Mapper to make the terrain using contours keeping to noted reference maps of the fantasy world and trying to stick to proper geological physics so that the rivers run where they should. The whole DEM is geo referenced such that it fits on a globe. My part in this project is to take the exported rastered DEMs and push them through GeoTerSys and try to get this app to provide better rivers, the snow and glaciers and all the other terrain simulation effects that it can. Our expectation is (or maybe 'was' now...) to generate the masks from this to put into Terragen via XML to render this DEM with its procedural textures for final views.
We have always wanted an engine which could handle the large data set that were producing but have so far not come up with anything. Our best chance so far would look like Ogre, the AdVantage engine, or WorldWind. The 3D world engine is something we have put off and were going to think about as time goes on.
The web site for me-dem is split between two sites but the galleries at present are on
www.me-dem.me.uk In there are a load of GeoTerSys images, ViewingDale ones and also loads of images of the Middle Earth DEM model so far.
So, the million dollar question is... is there a demo of the world engine that can be used to try it out with our data set and fly around Middle Earth ? Were beta testers for several apps like World Machine etc because we seem to break everything with it.
