openvistapro/docs/knowledgebase/feature-inventory.md

Feature Inventory

This is a first-pass inventory from the VistaPro 2/3 manuals, MakePath guide, screenshots, and public descriptions.

Terrain sources

• VistaPro landscape files.
• USGS DEM elevation data.
• NASA/planetary or other gridded elevation datasets.
• Fractal landscape generation.
• User-supplied two-dimensional integer height arrays, up to historical limits around 1024x1024.

Scene controls

• Camera and target X/Y/Z positioning.
• Lens/range controls.
• Bank, heading, and pitch.
• Sea level and water planes.
• Lake and river controls.
• Timber/tree line, tree drawing, and tree density.
• Snow line.
• Haze/fog distance.
• Sky/stars options.
• Light direction and custom lighting.
• Vertical exaggeration.
• Color maps/palettes.
• Texture image loading, including PCX in the Windows manual.

Rendering and quality

• Wire/topographic preview workflow.
• Progressive/final render action.
• Quality menu/settings for smoothing/detail/performance tradeoffs.
• Save rendered images; historical formats included IFF/IFF24/RGB on Amiga and PC-era formats on Windows.
• 24-bit output was a differentiator in user examples.

Scripting and animation

• Script files list camera/target positions and commands.
• Scripts are landscape-independent enough to rerun against different terrain/settings.
• Commands include camera coordinates, vertical scale, and render actions.
• VistaPro could generate simple linear camera-to-target paths.
• MakePath Flight Director created spline paths over a topographic map and exported VistaPro scripts.
• MakePath vehicle models included jet, glider, dune buggy, motorcycle, helicopter, cruise missile, and custom vehicles.

UI surfaces observed in screenshots

• Main workspace with topographic map/preview on the left and dense control panels on the right.
• Pull-down menus: Project, Load, Save, Exp/Imp, Script, Image, Quality, and related dialogs.
• File dialogs and confirmation/progress dialogs.
• Numeric/text gadgets for direct value editing.
• Multiple lower control panels for color-map/palette editing, fractal settings, lighting, and scene/environment settings.
• Color-map editor with vertical channel/range sliders and palette swatches.
• Map/radar-like view for camera/target placement.

Normalized UI panel map

• Viewport / preview: the central render surface. Today this is the egui CentralPanel preview in src/app.rs.
• Terrain / import: terrain source selection and generated-terrain presets. Today this is only a small preset selector; legacy import UI is still absent.
• Scene / camera: camera, target, water, tree line, snow line, haze, and related controls. Today the app has position/target plus the scene-band sliders.
• Render: preview vs final render and render-quality choices. Today only the top-down vs perspective switch exists.
• Scripts / paths: script menu, animation frames, and MakePath-style path generation. Today this is planned only.
• File / project actions: load/save/open/export and scene-file operations. Today this is planned only, with a loaded-scene path tracked internally.
• Status / feedback: live readouts, progress, and current file/scene state. Today this is planned only.
• Deferred features / legacy compatibility: menus, dialogs, palette editing, advanced lighting, hydrology, vertical exaggeration, and legacy export formats. Today these remain future work.

Modernization opportunities

• Replace dense fixed control panels with an immediate-mode or dockable UI shell.
• Use modern terrain formats: GeoTIFF/COG, DEM, HGT/SRTM, PNG/RAW heightmaps.
• Use WGPU for cross-platform rendering.
• Add reproducible scene files in human-readable formats such as RON/TOML/JSON.
• Provide CLI rendering for tests and batch workflows.
• Keep compatibility import/export separate from the clean internal model.