Well, Maptek Vulcan 9 is finally here. This version was
expected to be released in late 2013 but didn’t make it to market until January
30th. I don’t know what took so long in the development process but
77 new upgrades and bug fixes must have played a role in the delay.
One of the biggest upgrades to Vulcan 9 is the change to how
the graphics engine is used. The new version of the software takes advantage of
your computer’s graphics card to display 3D images on the screen. This means
that really big triangulations and grids won’t slow down the machine as much.
Previously, Vulcan had used the central processing unit (cpu) to render images
on the screen. This made things slow and cumbersome especially if images were
being rotated or magnified.
I think everyone has run into a situation where
rotating a big topography triangulation has become so slow and choppy that they
just gave up. Those days are (mostly) over. Vulcan 9 does a great job
displaying very large triangulations. This biggest improvement to the software
also comes with a warning. Part of the documentation for Vulcan 9 encourages
the user to make sure that the graphics driver for their machine is up to date.
Apparently, there have been issues with some graphics cards not playing well
with the new graphics engine.
The upgrades to Vulcan graphics are all part of the change
to the dynamic memory settings. I have always thought that Vulcan’s ‘dynamic
memory settings’ naming convention was a bit of a misnomer. Sure you could
change the amount of memory assigned to display images vs processing data, but
once the software was running you couldn't change how memory was allocated. You
had to restart Vulcan to modify the ‘dynamic memory settings.’ In Vulcan 9 that
has all gone away. Memory is now managed ‘dynamically’ by the system. Maptek
even left a hole in the splash screen where the option used to be so the user
can take note of its absence.
Other important items to me in this new version include one
that isn't there. In my
notes for Vulcan 8.2.2 Maptek promised that spaces in
path names for Whittle import would be fixed. I must have been too liberal in
my description of what needed to be fixed. The guys at Maptek fixed the space
name problem for Vulcan block model file names but the .res and .par files (the essence of what you are importing from Whittle) that
are what is being imported still don’t like spaces in the file
names. The Maptek guys tell me that this is recorded as bug number VUL-29545
and will be fixed at some future date
L.