Peregrine
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I’ve recently joined this fine community and was stoked to see all the mods and theaters available (even so quickly after 4.33 release). I’m a developer and was really interested in making my own theater. So I asked around, got some pretty short answers and a few nudges in the right direction. I decided to crack my knuckles and get to work. I tried all the tools and they all felt cumbersome to use. So I decided to write my own real quick.
Here is what I’ve come up with so far after a few weeks worth of work.
Announcing…
Peregrine
A GIS Tool for generating terrain and feature data.
**ALPHA DOWNLOAD
Peregrine Pre-Alpha w/ Plugin SourceMinimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
RAM: 4GB Ram
GFX: 1GB vram Geforce 8800 or equiv w/ Shader Model 2.0
Internet: 1mbps internet connection or betterRecommended System Requirements:
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
RAM: 8GB Ram
GFX: 4GB vram Geforce GTX or ATI Radeon R Series card or better.32-bit platforms are NOT supported!
Features:
- Plugin System (In Progress)
- Over 14 Providers of Data (Done)
- Multiple GIS Projection Support (Done)
- Super High Resolution Commercial Aerial Photography (Done)
- Map Tile Extractor (Done)
- Map Tile Mosaic’er (Done)
- 3D Mesh Construction (DXF, 3DS, JSON, X, Collada) (In Progress)
- 3D World View (In Progress)
- GIS Drawing Tools (In Progress)
- L2/O2 Reader/Writer (In Progress)
- Texture.bin Editor (In Progress)
- Hardware Accelerated Graphics (Done)
- Super Fast Caching System (Done)
- GIS Database Support (MySQL/MSSQL/PostgreSQL/Sqlite/Folder) (Done)
- Project Workspace Management (In Progress)
- GRIB Export (In Progress)
- World Weather Coverage (Cloud Coverage Done, Sat/IR Precip layer needs world data)
- Latest World AIRAC NavData (as of writing 1501) (Done, w/ auto updating capabilities for each cycle)
- Airport Diagrams, SID/STAR Charts, RNAV/DME Approaches/Departures (In Progress)
- VFR/IFR(H)/IFR(L) Charts (Done)
- BMS Database/TDF/CSV Integration (In Progress)
I want to include more direct BMS integration for creating an entire theater within Peregrine. That’s going to take some time and some cooperation from fellow board members and project leads.
When I initially started asking around about it, some members were really helpful in pointing me towards websites etc that documented the data. Others felt that information was better kept secret. Thank you to those who answered my posts. Here’s what I got so far.Screenshots:
Main Application
USA
Washington D.C. Hybrid
Washington D.C. Satellite
Washington D.C. High Res Aerials
Pensacola NAS (Pensacola, FL)
VFR Pensacola
IFR Low Pensacola
Uber High Res Pensacola NAS
Korea
Korea VFR
Korea GMTED Elevation/Coast Data 7.5 Arc Sec**
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Update
Fixed Satellite Cloud/Precipitation Coverage.
World world? Check. -
So to clarify - Peregrine will be a single program theater creator? Is that correct?
Does this replace or complement existing tools? Its sounding like it is intended to replace, much like how Mission Commander is intended to replace TacEdit.
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So to clarify - Peregrine will be a single program theater creator? Is that correct?
If yes, then holy crap. I’m following this closely.
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So to clarify - Peregrine will be a single program theater creator? Is that correct?
Does this replace or complement existing tools? Its sounding like it is intended to replace, much like how Mission Commander is intended to replace TacEdit.
Indeed it’s a replace. It took me a week to get dem2terrain to read a GeoTIFF. I had to translate it into dozens of formats before I found one it liked. Then, the E00 problem. Everyone has moved onto ArcInfo SHP files. So that’s what I’ve included. Eventually, you’ll be able to do almost all the theater editing within Peregrine, objectives and all. So it’s a planned replacement for dem2terrain, Monster’s Terrain Editor, Mission Commander, CATE, and f4ResTool, all in one.
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Very interested in this…
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It sounds very impressive in scope! Will have to keep an eye out for a download link…
What features of Mission Commander are in scope for Peregrine? It seems a little odd to include with all the rest.
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It sounds very impressive in scope! Will have to keep an eye out for a download link…
What features of Mission Commander are in scope for Peregrine? It seems a little odd to include with all the rest.
The ability to define airbases, objectives, squadrons, etc. Creating of CAM/TAC files in their entirety. Mission Commander is good software, but Peregrine is going to do that using GIS methods to improve accuracy. This will all come from a plugin accessible from the Plugin Menu you see at the top of the window.
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Gotta love community development. Good luck on this project, will be very interesting
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Wow, this tool is a huge breakthrough. If all of the features that reported are implemented, the time it takes to build might just be reduced by a factor of 90%. Theatre building could done in months rather than years.
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Fixed a source for full world satellite/precipitation cloud layer.
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This is great.
You can also incorporate CATE with a good script (for Auto-tiling) and some campaign setup (countries, etc). You can also go beyond just terrain generation and add features like “Add New Aircraft” because a lot of it is just editing text files. I think you can get a tool to automatically build the entire theatre, users would only have to specify their aircraft models and skins and artwork. You can look at PMC forum for some hints on how to do certain things too.
Keep us updated.
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This is great.
You can also incorporate CATE with a good script (for Auto-tiling) and some campaign setup (countries, etc). You can also go beyond just terrain generation and add features like “Add New Aircraft” because a lot of it is just editing text files. I think you can get a tool to automatically build the entire theatre, users would only have to specify their aircraft models and skins and artwork. You can look at PMC forum for some hints on how to do certain things too.
Keep us updated.
CATE will be obsolete. Peregrine will tile elevations based on GMTED data, from there, you’ll be able to tile areas with satellite imagery. Once BMS get’s past it’s 4096 tile texture limit (dev’s, pm me if you want me to help), I can automate texture tiling across the entire map.
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Excellent, looks very promising, thanks for your effort on this!
Perhaps you might be able to find a solution too on how to make the flat terrain currently (since falcon day-1) to a true earth sphere.
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Excellent, looks very promising, thanks for your effort on this!
Perhaps you might be able to find a solution too on how to make the flat terrain currently (since falcon day-1) to a true earth sphere.
Elevation can be re-spherized based on the arc/degree of the data, sure. Would still be a “flat map” but elevations would be added to project the curvature back into the mesh.
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CATE will be obsolete. Peregrine will tile elevations based on GMTED data, from there, you’ll be able to tile areas with satellite imagery. Once BMS get’s past it’s 4096 tile texture limit (dev’s, pm me if you want me to help), I can automate texture tiling across the entire map.
Hi, tiling is obsolete I think… the main problem with tiles is the huge number of textures which basically causing a lot of overhead for the DX API (crazy number of draw calls).
Interesting stuff BTW
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Hi, tiling is obsolete I think… the main problem with tiles is the huge number of textures which basically causing a lot of overhead for the DX API (crazy number of draw calls).
Interesting stuff BTW
I-Hawk, if BMS went to a DX11 API, you could offload much of the texture computations of to the GPU. Furthermore, Updating to a GFX Engine like Python would make the change to DX11 much simpler and make the base BMS program much less CPU intensive in turn.
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Sure. Can you code it??
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I-Hawk, if BMS went to a DX11 API, you could offload much of the texture computations of to the GPU. Furthermore, Updating to a GFX Engine like Python would make the change to DX11 much simpler and make the base BMS program much less CPU intensive in turn.
Well… upgrading to DX11 isn’t a simple task. But I don’t see how DX11 will solve the API problems, in fact AFAIK in DX11 such overhead from number of textures/draw-calls for terrain will become worse… The terrain engine must change drastically in order to output quality results with decent performance.
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… Here is what I’ve come up with so far after a few weeks worth of work.
Why …
… didn’t you create Peregrine already 10 years ago?
According to your post it sounds coding it is easy and quick to do,
although I personally think it’s not that easy.Anyway, great stuff.
Cheers,
LS