Hello planet! After attending two Akademys and contributing my first patch to KDE before 4.0, I have finally decided to join the blogosphere. So let me introduce myself. My name is… well, I’ll leave that as an exercise to the committed reader. 🙂 I’m mainly involved with Kate, our favorite KDE text editor, and Marble, our beloved virtual globe and geobrowser.

Today I want to announce a project that I’ve been working on since a few weeks now. Impressed by Google Earth’s 3D capabilities, I wanted to have the same experience in Marble as well, but Marble being a truly free software project. So I started to work on an experimental OpenGL branch to see whether my idea worked out. And indeed, I was able to demonstrate a working prototype during the Marble Weekend which was very well received to say the least… So without further ado, here is a demostration for you:

Link to the original video.

As for the technical details, there are still some architectural changes to be made to the Marble library before the OpenGL mode can be cleanly integrated. I hope that we’ll have adjusted our APIs before the freeze for 4.6, but programmers using libmarblewidget should be prepared for some major API breakage at least during the 4.6 development cycle. Sorry for that. 🙂 As a bounty, I think that the new API will be even more Qt-ish and flexible at the same time.

Similar to KWin, our final goal is to support two graphics systems: OpenGL and plain 2D where OpenGL doesn’t work. The challenge, though, is to keep our code base coherent: We do not want to have a divergent code base (one for OpenGL, one for QPainter) due to the nature of the two graphics systems. However, before these issues can be solved, we still need to port a couple of features to the 3D mode (see below).

As you can see, there is lots of work to be done before Marble’s OpenGL mode can enter the masses. In the meantime, I’m looking for solutions on how to improve the (perceived) OpenGL performance and how to draw GPS tracks and placemarks in 3D. So if you happen to have some experience with OpenGL, I’d be happy to hear from you. On the other hand, if you’re just a curious user who gets excited about Marble’s OpenGL mode, I’d be happy to get some feedback from you as well!

Have fun and see you next time.

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