MÄK is making a huge investment in our premier visual suite, VR-Vantage. Last year we made tremendous strides by adding ocean and maritime visualization. The work continues full force as we continue to improve our visual environment. The next release of VR-Vantage, 2.0, is planned for later this year and has two major directions: performance improvements and visual quality enhancements.
We are committed to improving performance in VR-Vantage. Look forward to shader optimizations that take advantage of game-based rendering techniques, an improved physics engine to enhance the visual interaction between objects (like ships that rock on the dynamic ocean), optimized loading algorithms for large terrains, and improved internal organization and grouping of geometries to maximize capabilities of the GPU. If that all sounds like techno-jargon, it is! We’re focusing on the complicated stuff so you can focus on better-looking, better- performing scenes that run at 60 frames per second (fps), the gold standard of smooth visualization.
Visually, we are concentrating on several areas: a beautiful environment, lighting effects (both day and night), improved trees and vegetation, and high fidelity sensor/camera modeling. Both the ocean and the sky in VR-Vantage have been greatly improved. The ocean supports many new features, including helicopter rotor wash, significantly faster/better wakes (both up close and from the air), and underwater crepuscular rays ("God Rays"). The sky draws faster and can be rendered with high-resolution clouds. Complex surf patterns on shorelines can now be configured through shape files, allowing surf to roll onto beaches and inlets accurately.