At Sundog Software, our main focus right now is a big internal re-architecture of the SilverLining Sky, 3D Cloud, and Weather SDK to make it thread-safe. The objective is to allow you to cull, update, and draw SilverLining from different threads (consistent with OpenSceneGraph’s threading model, for example,) without having to introduce Mutex locks that can hurt your performance. It will also allow you to build up command lists for different views simultaneously, which is an important ability for virtual reality applications. VR seems to be where the training and simulation industry is headed, and we want SilverLining to be blazingly fast even when you’re rendering two (or more) views at once.

It’s going to take several months for us to get there, but we’re going to release many incremental updates as we go to make sure we don’t break anything. Our objective is to maintain backward compatibility with our existing public API for SilverLining, so if you don’t want to update your application to take advantage of our new multi-threaded capabilities yet, you won’t have to do a thing. But you’ll have the option of creating Camera objects for each view, and passing them along explicitly when you want to draw something with SilverLining. This will allow us to process those views simultaneously from different threads. We anticipate the new API will be very similar to the new multi-threaded API of the Triton Ocean SDK we released earlier this year.

Meanwhile, if you encounter any unexpected problems with our SDK updates as we go, please let us know at support@sundog-soft.com. We want to catch any issues with this effort early, which is why we’re releasing it in an incremental manner.