paysages3d/TODO

Technology Preview 2 :
- Finalize terrain editor.
   => Add a generation dialog for base noise (overwriting changes).
   => Implement chunks merging (with max size control).
- Get rid of noise dialogs, for simpler settings.
- Finalize lighting/clouds refactoring
   => Restore cloud lighting
   => Improve cloud rendering precision (and beware of precision discontinuity when rendering clouds in front of ground (shorter distance)).
- Finish texture refactoring.
   => Add detail texture.
   => Displacement on 3d explorer and previews.
   => Optimize ray marching (for tracing and shadows), using base terrain and displacement power.
- Fix rendering when inside a cloud layer, with other upper or lower layers.
- Translations.

Technlogy Preview 3 :
- Improve terrain 3D editor:
   => Add a map preview with edit area highlighted.
   => Allow zooming and simplified camera control.
- Better time selection widget for atmosphere.
- Clouds should keep distance to ground.
- Find a proper model for night sky (maybe Shirley).
- Create a StandardPreviewClass in C-lib (with renderer, updateData, changeView, getColor, choices and toggles).
- Fully move layer management from BaseForm to BaseFormLayer.
- Start vegetation system.
- Allow render saving in HDR compatible format.
- Add clouds to explorer with 3d textures.
- Add fresnel effect to specular lighting.
- Add "hardness to light" and shadow control ("minimum lighting") to material.
- Start using OpenCL to optimize rendering.
- Fully restore render progress (with first pass).
- Rethink the quality settings and detail smoothing in the distance.
   => When quality setting is set to 10, add boost options
   => Add detail boost (adds granularity)
   => Add step boost (for marching algorithms)
- Add logarithmic sliders for some float values.
- Improve previews.
   => Add user markers on OSD.
   => Add areas marking.
- Add a noise automatic filler.
- Lock some previews together (eg: terrain height and colored preview).
- Find a new licence.

Technology Preview 4 :
- Implement Sub Surface Scattering for water, textures and clouds.
- Implement earth curvature.
- Use bicubic interpolation for antialiasing.
- Allow for larger renders/antialias (will need several two-pass chunks).
- Add a progress indicator on previews.
- Multi threaded first pass.
- Mark modified tabs and ask for losing modifications (idem for layers).
- Fix potential holes in land rendering.
- Progressive final render (increasing resolution, for second pass only).
- Water and terrain LOD moves with the camera, fix it like in the wanderer.
- Improve 3d explorer
   => Restore LOD and intelligent poly count (and raise max tessellation)
   => Better handling of high altitude
   => Interrupt chunk rendering when quitting dialog
   => Don't display the water if it's below all ground
   => Try to overcome the near frustum cutting
   => Add toggles (for water...)
   => Max texture size should depend on GPU memory available
- Interrupt preview chunk renderings that will be discarded at commit, or that are no more visible.

Release Candidate :
- Polish all features and UI.
- More translations.