07 Apr 08 Terrain rendering in Ada
A while ago I added another old project of mine to the projects page but I neglected to post about it.
The project is based on an old school project of mine from the university. It’s a terrain rendering engine written in Ada which was intended to be capable of handling very large terrains of very high detail, +/- 1 meter at the maximum zoom level if I recall correctly.
Since at the time the few OpenGL-bindings that existed for Ada were highly outdated and of varying quality I quickly decided I had to remedy the situation myself. It resulted in the AdaOpenGL project which to this very day, even though I haven’t updated it in over four years, still has a significant amount of downloads (according to SourceForge statistics). People have even tracked me down and called me personally about it, which was a first for me. For these very reasons I often have a guilty conscience for not bringing the project up to date. Two developers have offered to assist but neither of them every produced any releases.
After I had a viable OpenGL-binding I started on the terrain engine itself. As you might suspect I spent a lot of time on the binding and based on the little time I had left I decided to only implement a basic scene graph for the terrain engine. The idea was that someone else would pick up where I left off but as it turned out the company I did the project with never asked for my source code, which I found rather weird considering their initial enthusiasm.
I gave the project the name AdaTerrainEngine as I cannot recall what I initially named it. The data files belong to the company which I did the project with so I cannot release them. I don’t really remember how useful the source code is but at least it should provide a basic foundation for anyone who is doing OpenGL work in Ada.
The terrain engine is LGPL-licensed and AdaOpenGL is BSD-licensed.
P.S. I blatantly stole the design for the AdaOpenGL-site from an awesome CSS tutorial. After I finished the page I realized I forgot to credit the original author and I couldn’t find the site again. If you have any idea who did this please let me know! D.S.
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