3D Rendering

[psi29a]

I want this... take terrain data and render it in real time. This also includes track-ball movement.

I'm thinking we can embed a OSG (openscenegraph) viewer into a PyQt child window.
http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?t=3491
http://wiki.qt.io/Using_3D_engines_with_Qt
http://forum.openscenegraph.org/viewtopic.php?t=1735

If that fails, there is this:
https://github.com/skylark13/osgboostpython

If that fails, there is always Glumpy which I have a working prototype for.

[ftomassetti]

I think that 3D rendering would indeed help to understand the world we are generating and correct issues in the generator. That is why I wrote a small prototype of a 3D viewer (https://github.com/ftomassetti/worldengine-viewer).

It would be definitely good to have such thing available during the generation process.

[psi29a]

Java! Blasphemer! :P

If we can, I'd like other people to do our dirty work. OSG for example already has a viewer executable that ships per default on all OSG installations that can read almost everything that libgdal supports. As a middle-step, we can use pylibgdal to export *.osg file (or ter) that can be read by the osgviewer and rendered in 3D for us.

The code is open-source and with python bindings, so we can hook into it via PyQt just as another window in the GUI. We can then shape it to our desires, adding textures, shading and etc.

[ftomassetti]

I did not want suggest to use Java: I was doing just that prototype to understand better the worlds we generate and look into the Java bindings. Let's keep using Python for the GUI.

[psi29a]

No worries, I know you have plans for Java. :)

[ftomassetti]

Damn, my plan has been discovered :)