Release Notes MicroImages, Inc. TNT-Products V. 6.8

TNTsim3D
for Windows
Introduction.
RELEASE OF RV6.8 TNT PRODUCTS
TNTsim3D continues to expand to provide you with an even better FREE product to
publish, distribute, and permit free use of your geospatial products. Many significant
new features have been added. Some of these features are particularly useful and are
probably unique, such as support of JPEG2000, multiple textures, virtual mosaicking,
stacking multiple terrains, operation in your language, and others.
Are you Ambidextrous?
Previous MEMOs have stressed that TNTsim3D is not a flight simulator. It is designed
to provide realistic interaction with your geodata and the results produced from it via
your geospatial analysis. This can be emphasized by referring to it as a geosimulation,
or geosim for short, as it is inherently geographical in nature. Movements within
TNTsim3D in a geosim may often be described as flying even though no aircraft type
performance envelope is enforced. For example, you can jerk around your views to a
new orientation at any time with your control devices (for example, using the View-
Center Locator gadget in the Map View). This is appropriate in the operation of a geosim
since you do not want to slowly fly to each new viewpoint of interest or have to learn
to bank to turn to your viewpoint.
TNTsim3D makes all your input devices (keyboard, mouse, and joystick) active at once.
Perhaps you have already found that it operates best if you use both hands (or switch
between
devices). Your joystick is a convenient device to simulate realistic movement
within a geosim. However, TNTsim3D also provides you with the mouse-controlled
tools needed to occupy specific positions (for example, View-Center Locator gadget)
and
feature-specific actions, such as the readout of map coordinates of any point in any
view.
Sometimes an action can be best controlled if assigned to two input devices. The joystick
can be programmed to use a control to move the altitude up and down in a realistic
fashion related to the setting used for its velocity and angular change controls. However,
the mouse scroll wheel also changes your altitude for fast repositioning at any time
or when used with the View-Center Locator gadget. For example, you can fly around
over a realistic scene using the joystick. Once you, or your client, become familiarized
with the realistic surface, you can use the mouse wheel to scroll up and down through a
set of layers of other kinds of data stacked below that surface. These might be various
processed image or maps layers overlaid on the same terrain but offset below the realis-
tic reference surface. Or, using the new stacked terrain features in RV6.8, these could
represent other kinds of non-geographic 3D surfaces of the same X-Y area but totally
different Z layers and associated texture overlays.
Maximum utility of a simulation results if you carefully set up to operate it using more than 1 input device.
Int egration with FREE TNTatlas.
If the simple feature analysis tools being added to TNTsim3D are not enough, you can
start a TNTatlas for any position in the geosim that you select with the mouse. Then you
MICROIMAGES MEMO 28
5 MAY 2003