Sundog’s real-time ocean simulation technology adds ship wakes, reflections, and correlation features

SEATTLE, WA September 8, 2011 - Sundog Software’s Triton ocean simulation technology for game, simulation, and training software developers has received a significant upgrade. Simulation of ship wakes, better support for water reflections, and features important for positioning objects on the water have all been introduced.

“We’ve added some of the most-requested features to Triton from the simulation and game development community,” said Frank Kane, founder of Sundog Software. “Creating ship wakes in a virtual environment was our number one request, and we’ve found a way to combine realism with performance for an unlimited number of ships moving at arbitrary paths, accelerations, and velocities. Our wakes displace the ocean surface, and generate spray and foam effects for added visual realism.”

Triton 1.1 also now provides for reflections of objects on the water such as ships and land masses, through its support of planar reflection maps. A sample application included with the SDK for the popular OpenSceneGraph engine illustrates the technique.

“We also added in a way to obtain the height of the ocean surface at any position,” continued Kane. “This allows developers to add object floating on the surface that move realistically with the waves.”

Triton is known for its performance, taking advantage of general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) capabilities and other parallel processing techniques to accelerate its underlying simulation of thousands of waves at once. In addition to enabling high frame-rates with realistic ocean scenes, it also includes support for round-Earth, “geocentric” coordinate systems commonly used for simulation and training applications.

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