Sundog Blog

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.

We received a tremendous response to our solicitation for beta testers for the upcoming Triton Ocean SDK(tm), Sundog’s latest product. We emailed our current customers and folks who subscribed to our mailing list, and were quite pleasantly surprised by the interest. News of the beta was also picked up by modsim.org. At this point we have more than enough testers lined up, and we’ve closed our application survey and are moving into testing.

Keep an eye on our website and sign up for our email newsletter (you can do so over in the right column there) to know when Triton’s released. We’re really excited to launch this new product, and we think you’ll like it. Triton offers infinite FFT-based oceans rendered from any height in flat or geocentric systems, with real physical simulation of waves for any given wind or Beaufort scale conditions. What really sets it apart is how it adapts to the parallel computing and GPGPU capabilities of the system it’s on; it can take advantage of multi-core processors, OpenCL, CUDA, and DirectX11 Compute Shaders depending on the environment, leading to 300+ fps on modern systems.

Head over to our download page to download the latest update to SilverLining, version 2.16. In this release, you’ll find improved support for OpenGL 3.2 and above, with all stray calls to deprecated OpenGL functions being removed, and improved driver compatibility. We also added support for lightning effects and atmosphere from space (atmospheric limb) effects for OpenGL 3.2+ contexts.

SilverLining 2.16 also adds support for Direct3D9Ex devices. To take advantage of this, just use SilverLining’s DirectX 9 renderer and pass it your Direct3D9Ex device when initializing the Atmosphere. SilverLining will detect that your device is an Ex one, and change the memory pools it uses automatically to be compatible with Direct3D9Ex.

As always, updates are free to licensed customers, and you’ll be able to find the full source distribution of 2.16 at the same URL and password you received with your registration.

SilverLining 2.15 features new integration code for the Ogre engine, for both Ogre 1.6 and Ogre 1.7. In addition to adding compatibility with the latest release of Ogre, we’ve updated the reference integration to take advantage of SilverLining’s leaner device reset handling – this will improve responsiveness when using Ogre’s DirectX9 renderer.

SilverLining allows you to add physically realistics skies, volumetric clouds, and weather effects to your Ogre-powered game or simulation, with both the OpenGL and DirectX renderers supported. Just download SilverLining 2.15 for Windows from our download page, and you’ll find an Ogre sample application in the “sample code” directory.

If you’re using the evaluation version of the SilverLining SDK, be sure to run Ogre in windowed mode – otherwise the license warning dialog box you need to acknowledge will be obscured.

Sundog’s SilverLining brings simulated skies, clouds, and precipitation to Trinigy’s Vision Game Engine

SEATTLE, WA AND AUSTIN, TX, April 12, 2011 – Sundog Software LLC, a leading developer of computer graphics middleware for rendering the sky and 3D clouds, has integrated its technology with Trinigy’s Vision Game Engine. The integration between Sundog’s SilverLining SDK and the Vision Game Engine is available today, and brings physically realistic skies, clouds, lighting, and precipitation effects to licensed users of Trinigy’s game engine on the PC platform.

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A minor release of SilverLining for Windows is now available at our download page. This release offers better handling of DirectX9 device reset events. Previously, you needed to delete and re-create your Atmosphere in response to device resets, but with SilverLining 2.13, they may be handled in a much more lightweight fashion.

We’ve made changes to create all of our resources as managed resources so they can survive a device reset, and exposed two new methods to Atmosphere (D3D9DeviceLost and D3D9DeviceReset) which you can call immediately prior to and after the device reset. Doing so will cause our shaders to capture and restore their states surrounding the reset. By using these methods, device resets are much more lightweight using SilverLining.

As this revision only affects users of our DirectX9 renderer, we haven’t issued a new release for Linux or MacOS; the latest revision for those platforms remains 2.12.

If you check out our download page, you’ll find that we now offer evaluation SDK’s for SilverLining built for specific distributions. You’ll find both 32-bit and 64-bit builds of the SilverLining SDK for most popular distributions:

• Ubuntu 10
• Fedora 14
• Debian 6
• Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.6
• OpenSUSE 11

For each distribution, we built SilverLining with the latest OS updates applied. Building the OpenGLExample sample application included with the SDK will require you to have the freeglut-devel package installed, in addition to g++ and the Mesa GLU and GL development packages (which you likely already have).

Licensed users have access to SilverLining’s full source code, and building for your specific distribution is just a matter of running make in the top level of our distribution.

If you have trouble linking with the SilverLining libraries under Linux or need a build for a distribution not listed above, send a note to support@sundog-soft.com and we’ll do our best to help you out.