New features of Vega Prime 2.2.1

The Vega Prime 2.2.1 release contains many new features and improvements. Below are the most noticeable enhancements which will help you achieve even better visual quality while improving demanding real-time performance.

Projected Light Lobes:
Light lobes have been improved in this new release of Vega Prime.

Light lobes are rendered correctly from the viewpoint of the ownship, or from the perspective of other observers within the scene. Light Lobes can now also be used with the skylight environment.

Technical details:
Projected light lobes are a shader based alternative to the existing Vega Prime light lobes. With the shader infrastructure enabled, projected light lobes can be added to any particular application. Projected light lobes have the same basic functionality and API of the original light lobes, but use global shader techniques that get applied to all geometry. The actual number of projected light lobes that will function for an application will depend on the total number of shader based techniques being utilized. Projected light lobes must exist prior to the pre-configuration stage of the application. A Projected light lobe can be controlled via a LightLobe::Control class just as the original light lobe implementation. A Projected light lobe also supports the concept of a fog effect. When enabled and in low visibility (e.g. a cloudlayer), this will produce an effect that that will represent the light lobe as expected from a first person perspective in very low visibility conditions. Note that even though the fog effect can be enabled at anytime, it only makes sense for it to be enabled when the eyepoint and the projected light lobe are at the same position.

The current implementation of projected light lobes does not take into account object occlusion, shadowing, or depth, so projected light lobes will "shine through" objects in the scene. The light source is currently not rendered. Depth related functionality and lighting effects may be added in the near future.

Marine:
This highly optimized Marine module based on Vega Prime can render large bodies of water, especially irregularly shaped, large bodies of water. Geometry is rendered with advanced shader techniques that make the (existing) geometry to appear to be water instead of the base texture applied to the geometry at the time it was modeled.

This provides the benefits of realistic water surfaces and effects without the performance impacts of dynamic geometry representing the water surface.

More technical details:
Vega Prime Marine supports round-earth oceans. Two new classes are introduced. The vpMarineOceanTechnique class is a vpMarineOcean that can account for the curvature of the earth. In cooperation with the vpMarineOceanAttribute class, geometry that has a vpMarineOceanAttribute attached will be rendered with advanced shader techniques that make the (existing) geometry to appear to be water instead of the base texture applied to the geometry at the time it was modeled. This highly optimized solution can render large bodies of water, especially irregularly shaped, large bodies of water.

 A new sample, vpmarine_round_earth, uses a round-earth database of Oceanside, California, that is included with the distribution of Vega Prime. This sample also demonstrates how to use this solution with flat-earth databases to render lakes, rivers, and oceans. 

Stern and hull wakes feature the ability to set the offset (in meters) to add to all height queries during the construction of the wake. The height offset should usually be no more than a fraction of a meter (just a few centimeters).

Click here to view the features of the four different types of oceans that Vega Prime Marine now supports.

SkyLight:
The fog/haze model in Vega Prime SkyLight has undergone some significant changes in order to address some known issues that occurred when the visibility range was brought in close to the eye (e.g. low visibility conditions).

Integration with Vega Prime IR and Marine also enable full usage of the skydome and celestial bodies (sun and moon). Given the higher tessellation of the skylight enabled skydome, improvements in skydome sampling were also achieved. In addition all marine Oceans are supported and all shader based techniques (global reflections, sun glint, and local reflections) are compatible with vpIR in both NVG and IR modes.

Technical details:

Previously the visibility range varied as a function of the ephemeris model, time of day and the visibility range. In order to provide more accurate, consistent fog and haze the SkyLight fog model now tries to more stringently honor the requested visibility range set by the user.

As a result, the fog and its effect on lighting will be improved and subtly different as compared to previous versions of Vega Prime.

 **This release also contains improvements from Vega Prime 2.2 (specifically in Environment / Light Lobe / Marine / OpenFlight Loader / Overlay / Path / SkyLight / TerraPage Loader / VSB Loader).