soillib

C++20 library and toolbox for procedural geomorphology simluation

Based on concepts developed by and maintained by Nicholas McDonald.

Normal Shaded Heightmap, 3D View (see: tool/viewer)

Relief Shaded Heightmap with Aerial Perspective (see: tool/relief)

Irregular Map Shape Normal Map (see: model/quad_hydrology)

Binary Soil-Mixture Transport Albedo Map (see: model/basic_hydrology_mixture)

Description

soillib is a unified C++20 library for procedural geomorphology simulation.

soillib provides modularized and unified concepts for many aspects of geomorphological simulations, from high-performance map structures to unified particle physics and a unified data import and export interfaces, including native GeoTIFF support.

Overall, this allows for creating complex geomorphological simulations through a thin implementation layer with predictable results and without requiring re-implementation. Example implementations can be found in the model directory. Utility programs for the manipulation of data can be found in the tool directory.

soillib is inspired by a number of predecessor systems and the difficulty of maintaining them all at the same time as concepts evolve. This allows for the maintenance of a single library, and re-implementing these programs on top of this library.

Highlights

• Unified cell-pool templates for efficient memory management
• Index templated map structures w. iterators for self-defined memory layouts
• Unified image import / export, including floating-point .tiff data. Saving and loading maps is extremely trivial
• Configurability of all core data-structures using yaml. No need to recompile, just update a single configuration file to change all simulation parameters. This is functional but still WIP and will be improved more in the futur.

This allows you to do things like e.g. using a morton-order indexed map with a fixed memory chunk, so that you can operate on contiguous segments which are spatially separated in parallel.

Tools and Models

Tool	Description
tool/viewer	View a floating-point .tiff height-map (or directory) as a shaded 3D model. Note that for a directory, they must have GeoTIFF metadata for relative positioning.
tool/relief	Render a relief-shaded .png for a single .tiff height-map.

Model	Description
model/basic_hydrology	Basic rectangular map hydrology model for meandering river erosion simulation.

Why C++20?

Concepts and type constraints are extremely convenient for defining complex operations which can be implemented for certain map and cell types, without becoming too specific.

As an example, see soillib/model/surface.hpp.

Utilization

Install the library headers using the Makefile.

make all

ToDo

This is a list of changes I would like to integrate into soillib. If you are reading this and motivated to implement any of these, I would be happy to accept any pull requests.

• soillib/io:
  • Add a convenience image iterator
  • Strict-Typed (Templated) Image Types w. Run-Time Deduction after Image Loading and Bit-Depth Determination, using e.g. std::variant. E.g. determine whether a .tiff is float32 or float64, but yield a strict-type.
  • Pre-Determined templated image types
  • Convenient but decoupled interoperability w. OpenGL textures through TinyEngine somehow.
  • Better image reallocation handling w. alignment and bit-masks.
  • Unified "GDAL No Data" point handling in GeoTIFF, including a meshing concept.
• soillib/util
  • Add a CRTP based buffer memory allocation tracker for debugging, to determine the total amount of memory consumed by soillib
  • Extend the memory pool to allow for paging through a tree.