Re: steps toward full-campus walkthroughs in WK

[Richard.Bukowski@cyra.com]

Hi Seth,

Nice to see the Walkthrough is still going strong. :)  I don't have any
hazards to point out, but I would actually point out that
the rudiments of this had been thought of in the latest redesign;
specifically, the new database structure explicitly supports
having multiple "databases-within-a-database."  Very little had been done
with it -- basically there's an argument to wkadd
to tell it which "sub-database" to add the data to, and that first dialog
that pops up when you open a DB within the viewer
is asking you to select which of the sub-databases you want to load.

If you look in the implementation of this, what it adds is a top-level
database node that indexes a number of sub-databases
by name, with each having an arbitrary transformation within global space.
This arbitrary transformation is intended to simulate
the "locally" axially aligned databases that may not be globally axially
aligned.  I don't think this is supported explicitly in the engine;
e.g. that transformation is not used currently, whichever sub-database you
load shows up in its local coordinate frame in the viewer.
However, the rudiments of a data structure to support what you're talking
about is there.  There are of course a number of obvious
improvements to be made (like placing the subspaces within a more advanced
spatial structure such as an octree).

Good luck :)

Richard Bukowski, Ph.D., Lead Software Engineer
Cyra Technologies Inc., San Ramon, CA 94583
Phone +1 925.790.2385, Fax +1 925.790.2309
Internet: bukowski@cyra.com