[Marble-devel] One month to Total Freeze!

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi,

On Friday 24 August 2007 14:04:39 Inge Wallin wrote:
> I believe that our features in Marble will fall into one of 3 categories:
>  - User features of the Marble application
>  - Features usable to application writers using MarbleWidget
>  - Desktop infrastructure, like DBUS support and similar

Yes, indeed. 

> So here is my suggestion for what to do for 4.0 and what we should wait
> with until 4.1. I won't touch any specific Qt-only releases here.

I think that what we deliver for 4.0 should be released as Marble 0.5.  This 
release should happen mid- to end of september and would just be feature 
complete and should mostly work. 
Further bug fixing, translations, optimizations and docs would happen on the 
way towards KDE 4.0.
No later than end of October I'd like to open a branch in which we can work on 
Marble 0.6 features already if necessary.

>  - Flat projection: 4.0
>    We're not talking days here until it's finished, but hours.

Well, actually in terms of bare features you might be right. But I'd like to 
see Mercator projection in addition as well. And the "optimization" to render 
only those parts of the screen that get newly shown.

>  - KML file support: 4.0
>    I'm not sure about the exact status here, but everybody seems to think
> it's going to be ready.  Murad?

If Murad continues to develop at the current pace I'm sure it will be.

>    I know that Torsten wants Mercator projection for 4.0, but have no idea
> if this is feasible.

More important to me is the ability to have Flat projection rendering only 
those portions of the screen that have changed. This will make Flat 
projection a 100% smooth choice for any hardware that runs Qt4.

I'd suggest to Carutsu to talk to the okular developer we kidnap at times to 
get some inspiration on implementation (hi Pinotree ;-)

>  - GHNS support to download new maps and maybe other stuff: 4.1
>   Would be awesome to have in 4.0, but do we have the time?

I just asked Josef two days ago and he told me he'd work on it during this 
weekend.

> Desktop infrastructure:
>  - DBUS controlling the marble application: 4.0

erm, actually current DBUS preperations will make even the widget be 
accessible via DBUS.

>  - Support for maps with higher resolution: 4.1
>    I think we need some changes in the engine, e.g. higher integer
> precision, which makes this feature too big for 4.0

Not sure about that yet. I'd like to have OpenStreetMap support for 4.0 
actually. It's not that much a matter of improving the software but providing 
the tiles in platte caree projection on a server. 
After all my cleanup I did yesterday was partially motivated by fixing 
limitations. Another thing we need to do is switching the tile size to 
512x512 as a preparation for basic experimental OpenGL support which is 
targeted for Marble 0.6 on my personal schedule. This has a few advantages 
which also deal with precision.

Other features on the TODO for 4.1 include:
- redo of the Vector backend. That includes:
* "vector tiles" based on VMAP0
* "area support", so selecting countries will be possible.

- Experimental OpenGL support as an alternative to the current pixel-perfect 
rendering backend



Torsten

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 Torsten Rahn

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