One of the specific purposes of 3.8 was the improvement of the animations in ILWIS. These days there is so much spatial temportal data available and the amount of research directed at that is staggering. There are many ways to study spatial temporal data but one of the important ones is by animations.
ILWIS and 3D
In the past ILWIS had limited 3D capabilities. One could make a GeoRef3D which generated a 3D image (with a DTM) but it was cumbersome to use and quite slow. One of the goals of the 3.8 was upgrading these capabilities to something usefull.
The new Layer view of the Map window
As people may have noticed who looked at the beta-1 of ILWIS 3.8, the way the user interacts with the layers displayed in the Map window is significantly different from previous versions. Basically the windows menu has been deprecated in favor of the layer view on the left side of the window. Almost all actions that changed the content of the rendering area are done through the layer view.
The Why? of ILWIS 3.8
My first few blogs will be about the upcomming 3.8 of which I published a first beta just before my holidays. The next beta will follow shortly.
The last few years, as a programmer, I encountered serious limitations in what ILWIS could render on the screen. The rendering system was designed when computers had far less memomry, puny (compared to now) graphic processors and the data-sets were much smaller. With large, multi-spectral and spatial – temporal data-sets, with big feature sets, web technology etc.., the existing system ran into serious limitations.