[gdal-dev] DDS format and World Wind layer

[Even Rouault]

Le mardi 29 mai 2012 09:45:36, Florent JITIAUX a écrit :
> Hi all,
> 
> first I would like to know if the DDS (Direct Draw Surface) format is
> planed to be integrated in Gdal.

Not to my knowledge. You would be interested in writing DDS tiles more than 
reading them, right ? To my understanding, the usual way of doing this is to 
have a graphical card and use some OpenGL or Direct3D to feed an uncompressed 
texture and get the compressed data back. Pure software implementation might 
exist, but I'm wondering if there are not software patents involved. At least, 
on the uncompression side, since it has been a long time issue in integrating 
S3TX decompression in Mesa.

http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/ could be a starting point for an 
integration in Open Source software.

> This format is used in World Wind and DDS
> tiles are loaded faster than JPEG or PNG tiles.
> 
> I would like also to know if it's planed to have the possibility of making
> World Wind layers.

There's a WorldWind minidriver in the GDAL WMS driver to read World Wind 
layers. See http://gdal.org/frmt_wms.html .

If you need to generate tiles for world wind, I believe that you could use 
something like the gdal2tiles.py script with a few adaptations, but I'm just 
guessing here being pretty much ignorant of WorldWind tiling particularities.