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SilverLining Sky & Weather SDK Supports HDR, GLSL
Posted by:
Frank Kane at Feb 14, 2010 14:23:45
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 Seattle, WA -- Sundog Software today released a new version of its popular "SilverLining" software, used for creating realistic skies, clouds, and weather effects in games, training systems, and visual simulation applications around the world. This latest release introduces much greater precision in its physical simulation of the sky, resulting in photo-realistic virtual environments for any simulated time, location, and weather conditions.
In addition to increased precision and visual quality, SilverLining version 1.95 adds lens flare effects, support for legacy compilers, and better compatibility with next-generation video cards currently hitting the market.
"We've taken real-time rendering of the sky to a new level, by moving from 32 bits of color information to 128 bits," said Frank Kane, owner of Sundog Software. "This added precision lets us support 'high-dynamic range' applications, which accurately render scenes that contain a wide range of luminance information. There are ten orders of magnitude between the brightness of a sunny day at noon and a moonless sky at night; SilverLining now lets you accurately capture that wide range of light."
SilverLining also renders 3D volumetric clouds using this same lighting scheme, as well as weather effects such as snow, sleet, rain, and fog, and must perform this rendering fast enough for the needs of customers producing games, flight simulators for the military, and television weather broadcasts. For training applications, every frame of animation must be drawn within 16 milliseconds, and drawing the sky may only take a portion of that time. "Maintaining high visual quality while meeting some very demanding performance requirements is what makes this job interesting," says Kane.
SilverLining is available for C++ developers on the Windows, Linux, and MacOS platforms, and provides a plug-in architecture to support rendering on other systems. More information, including screenshots, a trial software development kit, a demo application, and licensing details may be found at http://www.sundog-soft.com/
Contact:
Frank Kane
fkane@sundog-soft.com
900 206th PL NE
Sammamish, WA 98074
Ph: 425.635.8683
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About Sundog Software, LLC
Founded in 2006, Sundog Software specializes in the real-time
rendering of the sky and everything in it. Its flagship product,
SilverLining, is a C++ code library that renders physically-realistic
skies, natural light sources, 3D volumetric clouds, and precipitation
effects for OpenGL or DirectX developers on MacOS, Windows, or Linux.
SilverLining is used worldwide by professional game developers, large
military contractors developing flight training simulators,
architectural visualization companies, and broadcast video application
developers.
Sundog Software is located outside of Seattle in Sammamish,
Washington. To learn more, please visit www.sundog-soft.com
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