This major feature release adds many new capabilities, while continuing to make significant improvements to our visuals, performance, and content.

Terrain:
Supporting our customer’s diverse terrain needs remains a top focus at MAK. This release adds support for the CDB and Blueberry3D terrain formats. VR-Vantage also expands our procedural terrain generation capabilities to add endless vegetation and complete airports on streaming (direct from source) terrains anywhere in the world. VR-Vantage can generate world-wide imagery and vegetation from land use data: spin the globe and find forests in the Pacific North West, deserts in the Sahara, or dense jungle in the Amazon.

If you are building an aircraft simulator you can land on any runway, anywhere. VR-Vantage can take advantage of airport source data and automatically generate runways, runway markings, runway lighting, taxiways, taxiway signs, beacons, and airport terminals for almost any airport in the world.

VR-Vantage 2.1 introduces support for CDB terrains. While the whole CDB standard isn’t supported yet, customers can import imagery and elevation layers from any CDB terrain database.

Blueberry3D terrain is now supported. Customers who want rich, detailed, and dense terrain for high performance on-the-ground simulations can load a dynamic Blueberry3D terrain through an additional VR-Vantage add-on module.

Performance:
As always, VR-Vantage continues to get faster. We have made numerous performance improvements to enable our customers to develop smooth 60fps scenes, including:

• Buoyancy model culling to increase performance in scenes with large numbers of buoys or ships
• Improved caching options for streaming terrain to avoid stalls
• Faster Speed Tree loading and paging to avoid stalls

Lighting:

• Lighting plays a big part in how your scene looks. This version of VR-Vantage makes many improvements to the general lighting of the scene including Fresnel reflections and better SpeedTree lighting at night.

Content:
Numerous high-quality models have been added to VR-Vantage, including Coast Guard boats, passenger ferries, many widely used UAVs, missile batteries, and lots of new human characters.

Other important features include touch screen support, camera vibrations for ISR simulations, support for Microsoft Visual C++ 12, and Mimic Track and Tether Track modes for a point on the ground.

For a complete description of these new features, as well as information on other improvements including bugs fixed, please see the Release Notes.