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Visualizer of Railway Simulation
What is Notio ?
Notio is an attempt to provide visualization of the railway simulation.
Visualization could be helpful for dispatchers and planners, that could
be able to observe any deficiences in their planning directly on the
computer, avoiding risk of real-world problems.
Currently, it consists of the following modules:
- software (hardware unaccelerated) graphic rendering engine
- topology subpart
- agent simulation core
Although graphics rendering seems to work reasonably well at this moment,
topology part and agent simulation core are not yet finished.
Graphic rendering engine
- uses 32-bit depth buffer (Z-buffer)
- uses 32-bit fixed point number math
- supports flat and gouraud shading model
- enables perspective correct texturing with gouraud shading
- accomplishes hidden object removal with the usage of stochastic oriented bounding boxes
- currently supports only 8-bit paletted devices (256 colors) with 16 degrees of color shading
- under Windows and Linux uses OpenGL GLUT as the framebuffer
The choice of the software rendering engine would enable to use visualizer on more exotic
operating systems with no general OpenGL/HW accelerated rendering facility. Also it provides
exceptional opportunity to learn principles of the realtime computer graphics.
Topology part
Plan is to provide complete framework (including editor) to build various types of tracks and rails.
Topology part should provide algorithmic support to the agent simulation core and to the graphic
engine. Also usage of graph optimization libraries such as LEDA is considered.
Simulation core
- agent based (MPE type simulation)
- discrete (process based) and semicontinuous simulation
- buffering of the simulation states for real-time presentation
Future
In the future, the plan is to provide
- working topology part and editor (railroad building, editor in FreePascal/Lazarus IDE), main priority
- functional and interactive railway simulation
- offline simulation visualization from prerecorded simulation run
- the ports to DOS/DJGPP (origin), GNU/HURD, Syllable and Solaris
- OpenGL full hardware acceleration (with SW rendering possibility)
- distributed simulation core (using MPI)
- provide compatibility with various simulation protocols
- performance port to AMD64 architecture and enable multiplatform functionality (currently i386 bound)
- enable SW rendering engine to use SDL and Allegro framebuffers
- provide complete 3D world with accurate models and behaviour ;-)
This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence