The Earth Is Square

Taking things into his own hands, so to speak, guil from the WorldWind forums has been working on an updated version of the Virtual Earth plug-in and has posted his results for testing.  You can download the new plug-in from here.

Fixes/Updates:

• Corrected some bugs concerning column and row wrap-around (tiles from south pole appearing in north pole, tiles with negative row or column indexes)
• Removed the need for proj 4, by encoding directly the Mercator projection and simplified some code managing the projection. It should improve slightly the performances
• Also added a transparent border/road/name layer
• Main modifications concern the optimisation of the mesh creation algorithm. I worked in radian instead of degrees to reduce angle conversions. I also changed the way it reprojects. The overhead due to Mercator reprojection is now linear in Meshpointcount instead of quadratic previously. This could significantly improve performances when using large Meshpointcount
• Fixed bug that causes crashes when downloading large numbers of tiles

Want a way to load OBJ or 3DS models into WWJava?  Toolshed on the WorldWind Forum has posted some raw code for an object loader.

It is FAR from a complete product, but I believe it can serve as a basis for a fairly good loader. It includes support for the OBJ format and 3DS.

Nigel_nt from the WorldWind forums has setup a NASAWW community site on AKO/DKO.  If you are in the military, use WorldWind and are a CAC card user, you can join this community.

If not.. well, you still have the forum then.

Has to be one of the fastest releases to date.. WWJava 0.4.1 has been released and can be downloaded here.

WWJ changes from 0.4.0 to 0.4.1

• Fixed NetworkStatus bug causing freeze for some
• Added an off-line attribute to the WorldWind class to elect not to use the network
• Added a show-network-status attribute to StatusBar

Just released today, WWJava 0.4.0 is now out for developers to download and use. You can also try it out via the Java Webstart.

WWJ changes from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0

• Annotations
• Ability of app to interpose on mouse events (See examples.LineBuilder)
• Network and host monitoring and status
• Faster WMS capabilities parsing
• Layer transparency fixed
• Transparency added to SurfaceImage
• ShutDown event
• KeyPollTimer's timer cancelled at call to shutdown.
• FlatGlobe promoted to main source (yet still partially implemented)
• BMNGOneImage included in default layer list
• Level 0 BMNG tiles removed from worldwind.jar
• Use of new faster JOGL text renderer
• View fixes
• Internal refactorings to support various features

What_Nick has been in a coding mood and has been working on WorldWind's KML support by adding in the time feature of KML.  This will be a nice addition to the KML Importer.. though I am still waiting for multiple KML file support