Saturday, July 19, 2008

Prism objects on Balloon

Today I have dedicated a couple of hours to integrate my funny Prism objects into Balloon.
Given a shapefile, all Polygon objects are read and rendered as Prisms.
Here is the result:

Friday, July 18, 2008

Using Polyline for shapefiles

I just tested the use of Polyline to render polygons and lines (from a shapefile) into WWJ, to achieve to power of "follow terrain" property.
Unfortunately it is very slow, at least in my ancient laptop.

Another solution I test is the use of SurfacePolygon to render the shapefile polygon elements. It have a good performance but you lost precision transforming vectorial data into a bitmap.

Depending on your needs you can chose between the two options.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Basic shapefile support on Balloon

Some time ago I have created a set of classes, using OpenGL primitives, to render efficiently shapefiles in WWJ.
Now, I have spend some time integrating it into Balloon. Here is the result:


The classes has veru good performance but has some important limitation:
  • First, it must be used with vertical exaggeration set to zero, that is, no relieve (and it is not much usefull a virtual globe without relive).
  • Second, there are no filled polygons, polygons are rendered has line loops.
I have made some test using Polyline for lines and SurfacePolygon for polygons but I need more time to test its performance with great amounts of data and integrate it into Balloon.