Sundog Blog

In addition to Ubuntu 11, we’ve added binary evaluation packages for the Triton Ocean SDK for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and OpenSUSE at our download page. We’ve also had enough people use Triton for Linux successfully that we’ve taken the “beta / experimental” label off of these packages.

Be sure to have the GLUT, Xmu, and Xi packages installed in order to run the OpenGL sample application included. For example, under Ubuntu you’d do this with:

sudo apt-get install freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libxmu-dev libxi-dev

We’ve also gotten the OpenSceneGraph samples working under Linux – just make sure you have the OSG_DIR environment variable defined, and you should be able to use the cmake files provided. Thanks to Trajce Nikolov for adding polish to the OSG samples for Linux for us.

SilverLining 2.30 is now available from our download page. In addition to several bug fixes and better compatibility with a wider range of graphics cards, it also includes substantial performance improvements for cumulus cloud types. In addition to being about twice as fast as in previous versions, our GPU ray-casted volumetric  stratocumulus clouds are also much more realistically lit and are rendered with higher quality. This higher quality has also reduced sampling artifacts in stratocumulus clouds, but if you still see any, try increasing the MAX_SAMPLES setting defined at the top of the stratocumulus fragment shaders in the resources/shaders directory. Visit our gallery to view some new screenshots of stratocumulus clouds in SilverLining 2.30.

We’ve posted a new video of Triton 1.2 on the Sundog Youtube Channel. Static images don’t really do the new spray effects in 1.2 justice, so a video seemed to be in order. It also illustrates shoreline effects, where waves align with the coastline and are steeper and more transparent in shallow water. We threw in some sun reflections and ship wakes to round it out. The Triton Ocean SDK 1.2 is available now at our download page!

New release of the Triton Ocean SDK provides fast, realistic water and waves for developers

Seattle, WA – November 18, 2011 – Realistic ocean waves with foam and spray as they break near the shore are coming soon to games and simulations worldwide. Sundog Software’s latest version of its Triton Ocean SDK provides developers with a toolkit for adding convincing open-ocean and shallow water effects to their virtual environments.

“Our top customer request was the handling of coastlines, and Triton 1.2 does this with unprecedented performance,” said Frank Kane, founder of Sundog. “Developers simply provide the depth and slope of the seafloor, and Triton automatically adjusts the wave heights, direction, and transparency to match the scene. As the waves break, foam and spray effects add to the realism. Even with tens of thousands of spray particles running alongside tens of thousands of individual waves, we’re still seeing performance of hundreds of frames per second.”

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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.