Tile improved

I have just improved tile images when its source are a WMS sever. Now, when the camera advances to the globe (and depending on its altitude) the set of tiles that composes the globe becomes more populated and with more detail (every tile queries for a more little piece of earth).
The next image show this. The left window shows all the globe with the Blue Marble images composed by 4x4 set of tiles. In the right window a zoom has made centered in Catalonia (Catalunya, where i live :) ).



Also note that the loading process doesn't use the brute force. Tiles that are hidden doesn't query the server for images, that is, only when a TileImage must to be rendered for the first time, it queries the server (or an image file, this depends on a Loader class) for the texture data.

A couple of new properties

I have just added a couple of new properties on the project. As you can see in the image, the set of shapes (called world limits) can be colored and select its line width.



Also, transprencies are added both to shapes and to images. Now I can overlap images and change it transparency to compare among them.

Basic shapefile support

Thanks to GeoTools The Balloon Projee can read shapefiles in an easyly way. From now there is very basic support for this type of files, reading only lat/lon values and rendering it as line loops.



Also, the rendering process has been improved modifying all renderable objects to use display lists.

Screenshots

Currently Balloon can load images and, indicating the lat/lot corners, positionig it. Of course the image must be in the lat/lot projection.

Also, it is possible to select a WMS server, choose a layer and load images tiles from it. The WMS import is not finished because it must be dynamic, it is, reload tiles when altitude changes.

To improve the net connection I was developed a basic cache system to store images and load it localy.

The Balloon Project blog

Today I decide to start a blog for my actual project: The Balloon project !!!
Mainly, three factors motivated me to start it:

1. The existence of other spectacular virtual globes, like World Wind and Google Earth, (and others less spectacular like WW2D).
   
2. Improve my knowledges about OpenGL, in concrete JOGL, basically to answer the questions: how works a virtual globe? and, how can I implement one?
   
3. The knowledge of the existence of the NetBeans platform and the desire to learn to use it :)

I have no much time to work in the project, but step by step I think can develop a good enought application ;)