V3 preview screenshots

We have been working very intensively on upcoming version 3 during the last month. We now have a stable and highly optimized very in our hands, so we decided to share some screenshot of this new amazing technology.

Version 3 key features are:

completely new terrain implementation, supporting the following features :
- Fully correct georeferencing
- Application controlled demand paging for out-of-core rendering (adaptive streaming and rendering)
- Collision detection support
- No terrain, no texture and no lighting popping, all level-of-detail changes are smoothly morphed and invisible
- Support for most common GIS file formats, including (but not limited to) GeoTIFF, TIFF with a world file (.tif/.tfw), JPEG2000, ECW, Mr SID, ERDAS Imagine (.img), ESRI shape file (coverage)
- Support for source image transparency channel, but also polygon coverage mask (shape file) – used by CNES Pleiades satellites for instance
- Terrain is the result of the compositing of 3 layers (bottom to top):
  - Layer A: Satellite/aerial image
    Up to 12.5cm/pixel resolution for satellite/aerial imagery layer
  - Layer B: Runway/apron/roads generic textured layer (using pre-defined materials)
    Resolution defined by asphalt/concrete texture, resolution more or less 1mm / pixel order of magnitude (depending on texture being used)
  - Layer C: Custom painted layer containing markings + decals
    Sub-centimeter resolution for vector/painted layer (runway, markings, etc…) (less than 1 cm per pixel)
- Unlimited area, while big area require more pre-processing (for instance 200x200km at 0.5m/pixel requires 12h to preprocess on a laptop)
- Anisotropic texture filtering support
- Core data included
  - Raster data (satellite) : included 500m/pixel world-wide coverage
  - Height data (altitude) : included 90m/pixel world-wide coverage
FAB terrain build time reduced dramatically
deferred rendering pipeline allowing an unlimited number of lights
many other improvements (much faster loading time, improved shadow quality, anti-aliasing on alpha-tested objects, etc...)

Below are some (programmer art) screenshots: