I decided to take my time and study the literature on 3D rendering, especially on maths (vertices, matrices, transformations…), which I forgot all about since my student days. I can highly recommend the 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development book which (contrary to many math books for developers) covers not just mathematical equations and theory, but also tries to explain this in a way more familiar to developers.

I abandoned the approach of continuing working on the cannibalized code from Mini 3D Terrain Viewer simply because there were too many problems which I didn’t know how to solve easily. Anyway, I think the skipping over basic stuff like 3D maths and DirectX is not very wise – sooner or later the things you neglected come to haunt you.

I started posting current results of my effort on flickr – this will be a sort of a snapshot history of Kosmos WorldFlier from the day one, step by step. Not much to see yet – I managed to render all OSM ways as 3D lines, you can see the Isle of Wight there. This is just a temporary solution – road should be rendered as mashes, but that will come later. Right now I’m working on the camera navigation stuff.

I’m still using DirectX managed SDK for this. I decided to implement the inital version with this SDK simply because I already have some limited experience with it – I didn’t want to make this harder by introducing some other SDK which I haven’t worked with yet. Later, I’ll probably migrate the code to use some other library (there are several options: OpenTK, Irrlicht or something else).