Sundog Blog

Sundog’s founder and principal engineer, Frank Kane, will be at the I/ITSEC conference in Orlando, Florida between November 29 and December 1. If you or your colleagues will be at the show, send Frank a note at fkane (at) sundog-soft.com to arrange a meeting or just a swing by your company’s booth. It’s a good chance to get some first-hand tips on optimizing your integration of SilverLining or Triton, and to give us feedback on the product direction that will help your company the most. We hope to see you there!

We’re excited to have Triton running on Ubuntu, with full support for OpenCL and CUDA as well as the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives for accelerating the FFT’s that power Triton’s waves. You’ll find some experimental installers for Ubuntu 10 and Ubuntu 11 at our download page right now. (Note, CUDA is not supported with Ubuntu 11 since NVidia’s CUDA Toolkit does not work with GCC 4.5 or newer – yet.)

If you target Linux systems with your product, we’d appreciate if you could give this a try and let us know if you run into any trouble at support@sundog-soft.com. If you develop using a distribution other than Ubuntu, let us know – we may be able to produce a package for your distribution, or give you the resources you need to compile Triton against your own system.

A big thank you to EDM Ltd. for funding a portion of the work to port Triton to Linux platforms.

Over on our download page you’ll find a new build of our integration with the Havok Vision Engine (formerly the Trinigy Vision Engine). The newly released Havok Vision Engine 8.2.1 is now officially supported by Sundog Software, and you can bring the full capabilities of SilverLining’s physically accurate skies, 3D volumetric clouds, precipitation effects, and tone-mapped natural scene lighting into your Vision scenes. In addition to low-level C++ access, vForge integration lets you add SilverLining to your scenes right at design time as well. To get started, first install the Havok Vision Engine and the SilverLining SDK for Windows, then install the integration package.

SilverLining’s procedural skies and 3D cumulus clouds are now available to users of the Unity game engine. SilverLining for Unity 1.0 is available right now in the Unity Asset Store. We’ve ported the same algorithms for physically accurate time of day effects, star positions, tone-mapped scene lighting, and real 3D volumetric cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds to C# and Unity’s framework. Since it’s a ground-up port built with Unity in mind, SilverLining for Unity does not rely on Unity Pro features or native plugins, and works across Unity’s supported platforms with great performance.

We’ve created a tutorial video and a Web Player so you can see SilverLining for Unity in action right inside your browser. We’re really excited to offer this integration!

Triton Ocean SDK 1.1 Released for Game, Simulation, and Training Developers

Sundog’s real-time ocean simulation technology adds ship wakes, reflections, and correlation features
SEATTLE, WA September 8, 2011 – Sundog Software’s Triton ocean simulation technology for game, simulation, and training software developers has received a significant upgrade. Simulation of ship wakes, better support for water reflections, and features important for positioning objects on the water have all been introduced.

“We’ve added some of the most-requested features to Triton from the simulation and game development community,” said Frank Kane, founder of Sundog Software. “Creating ship wakes in a virtual environment was our number one request, and we’ve found a way to combine realism with performance for an unlimited number of ships moving at arbitrary paths, accelerations, and velocities. Our wakes displace the ocean surface, and generate spray and foam effects for added visual realism.”

Triton 1.1 also now provides for reflections of objects on the water such as ships and land masses, through its support of planar reflection maps. A sample application included with the SDK for the popular OpenSceneGraph engine illustrates the technique.

“We also added in a way to obtain the height of the ocean surface at any position,” continued Kane. “This allows developers to add object floating on the surface that move realistically with the waves.”

Triton is known for its performance, taking advantage of general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) capabilities and other parallel processing techniques to accelerate its underlying simulation of thousands of waves at once. In addition to enabling high frame-rates with realistic ocean scenes, it also includes support for round-Earth, “geocentric” coordinate systems commonly used for simulation and training applications.

Free evaluation versions of Triton are available at Sundog’s website at http://www.sundog-soft.com/. Triton is available for Windows C++ developers, and integrates with any application built on top of OpenGL or DirectX.

We’re proud to announce that for the third year in a row, Military Training Technology magazine has awarded us a Top Simulation and Training Company ribbon in recognition of Sundog Software’s rapid growth. Take a look at the customer logos that rotate through on our home page, and you’ll see why. We continue to be humbled by the places where Sundog’s SilverLining and Triton libraries can be found, and thank all of our customers for helping us achieve this recognition.

We’ve partnered with LinkSoft to provide sales support for our customers in China. We’ve seen massive interest in SilverLining and Triton from Asian developers, and in order to provide the best customer experience, we’ve teamed up with Taiwan-based LinkSoft to provide local sales and information. Of course, you can always purchase our products directly from Sundog’s online store as well – that’s always the fastest way to get your license code!

Makers of the popular SilverLining sky, cloud, and weather SDK release a new product for real-time visual simulation of 3D oceans

Sammamish, WA August 2, 2011 – Sundog Software released its new Triton Ocean SDK for creating realistic oceans for simulation, training, and video game applications. Currently known for its widely-used SilverLining software package for simulating the sky, Sundog has now turned its attention to the simulation of water.

“We’ve applied everything we’ve learned from supporting some of the biggest names in aviation, defence, and games with SilverLining to Triton,” said Frank Kane, Founder of Sundog Software. “The same ease of integration across multiple 3D engines, performance, and extensibility that led to SilverLining’s success is now available for creating realistic ocean scenes as well.”

Triton takes any given wind conditions or Beaufort scale conditions, and automatically creates 3D, animated ocean scenes with matching wave heights and motion. It simulates thousands of waves at once using inverse Fast Fourier Transform techniques, and does so quickly by taking advantage of the latest advances in consumer graphics technology.

“What sets Triton apart is its speed,” said Kane. “It adapts to the system you’re on to take advantage of any parallel processing capabilities that might be present, whether it’s general-purpose GPU computing technologies such as CUDA, DirectX11 Compute Shaders, and OpenCL, or multi-core processors. The result is highly complex ocean scenes from any altitude running at hundreds of frames per second on modern systems.”

Triton may also be used with whole-Earth, “geocentric” simulation systems, and is compatible with C++ Windows-based 3D engines built with OpenGL, DirectX9, or DirectX11. Sample code is provided for the popular OpenSceneGraph and Ogre 3D engines.

A demo application, free evaluation SDK, screenshots, and licensing information for Triton are available at http://www.sundog-soft.com

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A sample project for SilverLining with the SceniX 7.0 engine is now available. NVidia recently released version 7 of its SceniX 3D engine, which includes some fairly substantial changes to its API as well as some performance improvements. With this sample, based on the GLUTMinimal sample project included with SceniX7, you’ll be able to add SilverLining’s real-time skies, 3D clouds, and weather effects to your SceniX7-based application. This sample will be included with future versions of the SilverLining SDK, alongside the SceniX 6.0 example already included in it.

Our latest version of SilverLining, 2.18, contains updated OpenSceneGraph samples. These new samples are compatible with the newly release OpenSceneGraph 3.0.0, allowing you to add SilverLining’s sky, clouds, and weather effects to your OSG 3.0 application.

These updated OSG samples also include an improved projection matrix callback, which substantially improves the calculation of the near and far clip planes when SilverLining’s atmospheric limb is enabled with the “enable-atmosphere-from-space” config setting. If you had problems with depth buffer precision or the near clip plane being pushed too far out and clipping objects close to the camera under these conditions, this update will help.