Hermes Agent
75 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
75 lines
3.7 KiB
Markdown
# Feature Inventory
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This is a first-pass inventory from the VistaPro 2/3 manuals, MakePath guide, screenshots, and public descriptions.
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## Terrain sources
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- VistaPro landscape files.
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- USGS DEM elevation data.
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- NASA/planetary or other gridded elevation datasets.
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- Fractal landscape generation.
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- User-supplied two-dimensional integer height arrays, up to historical limits around 1024x1024.
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## Scene controls
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- Camera and target X/Y/Z positioning.
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- Lens/range controls.
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- Bank, heading, and pitch.
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- Sea level and water planes.
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- Lake and river controls.
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- Timber/tree line, tree drawing, and tree density.
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- Snow line.
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- Haze/fog distance.
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- Sky/stars options.
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- Light direction and custom lighting.
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- Vertical exaggeration.
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- Color maps/palettes.
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- Texture image loading, including PCX in the Windows manual.
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## Rendering and quality
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- Wire/topographic preview workflow.
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- Progressive/final render action.
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- Quality menu/settings for smoothing/detail/performance tradeoffs.
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- Save rendered images; historical formats included IFF/IFF24/RGB on Amiga and PC-era formats on Windows.
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- 24-bit output was a differentiator in user examples.
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## Scripting and animation
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- Script files list camera/target positions and commands.
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- Scripts are landscape-independent enough to rerun against different terrain/settings.
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- Commands include camera coordinates, vertical scale, and render actions.
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- VistaPro could generate simple linear camera-to-target paths.
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- MakePath Flight Director created spline paths over a topographic map and exported VistaPro scripts.
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- MakePath vehicle models included jet, glider, dune buggy, motorcycle, helicopter, cruise missile, and custom vehicles.
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## UI surfaces observed in screenshots
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- Main workspace with topographic map/preview on the left and dense control panels on the right.
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- Pull-down menus: Project, Load, Save, Exp/Imp, Script, Image, Quality, and related dialogs.
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- File dialogs and confirmation/progress dialogs.
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- Numeric/text gadgets for direct value editing.
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- Multiple lower control panels for color-map/palette editing, fractal settings, lighting, and scene/environment settings.
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- Color-map editor with vertical channel/range sliders and palette swatches.
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- Map/radar-like view for camera/target placement.
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## Normalized UI panel map
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- Viewport / preview: the central render surface. Today this is the egui `CentralPanel` preview in `src/app.rs`.
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- Terrain / import: terrain source selection and generated-terrain presets. Today this is only a small preset selector; legacy import UI is still absent.
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- Scene / camera: camera, target, water, tree line, snow line, haze, and related controls. Today the app has position/target plus the scene-band sliders.
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- Render: preview vs final render and render-quality choices. Today only the top-down vs perspective switch exists.
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- Scripts / paths: script menu, animation frames, and MakePath-style path generation. Today this is planned only.
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- File / project actions: load/save/open/export and scene-file operations. Today this is planned only, with a loaded-scene path tracked internally.
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- Status / feedback: live readouts, progress, and current file/scene state. Today this is planned only.
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- Deferred features / legacy compatibility: menus, dialogs, palette editing, advanced lighting, hydrology, vertical exaggeration, and legacy export formats. Today these remain future work.
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## Modernization opportunities
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- Replace dense fixed control panels with an immediate-mode or dockable UI shell.
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- Use modern terrain formats: GeoTIFF/COG, DEM, HGT/SRTM, PNG/RAW heightmaps.
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- Use WGPU for cross-platform rendering.
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- Add reproducible scene files in human-readable formats such as RON/TOML/JSON.
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- Provide CLI rendering for tests and batch workflows.
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- Keep compatibility import/export separate from the clean internal model.
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