Hello, monks here from ME-DEM. It's great to see that our lil' baby
elephant still has a caring family- (trumpets appreciatively) hehe.
You're right about the l...o...n...g term time frame- we'll all be
long in the tooth ere the task is done !
I just wanted to pipe in with a couple of details if that's OK Aaron.
The most useful short term addition would be the image overlay (with
transparency) so that terrain could be 'defined' from a topo
reference. Like tracing over it. I see that that is on the dev
roadmap so that's great. With this we might be able to go ahead with
using L3D straight away (without all the other cool stuff mentioned
of course).
The abilty to load existing terrain and create in this manner in
*replace mode*. So one would load up a low res dem with the
corresponding image overlay (topo map) and then use the elevations of
that low res dem for reference (one would need some kind of cursor
feedback for height or something) along with the topo overlay. So one
would know, here is a mountain and this is it's approx height. Define
it with the L3D tools and bingo.
The ability to load up tile sets that are multiples of x Km (on the
first pass each tile will be 1K px on a side at 1 px= 20m....20 Km on
a side, on the second pass (down the line) each tile with a factor of
10 larger scale- that is, each tile being 1K px still, but at 2m res,
so 2 Km on a side). This would be really useful as users could work
on larger areas (which is probably the preferred approach).
ps Joe Slayton of Wilbur (he's helped us out already). ;)
ps I'm still convinced that L3D could fundamentally change the way
people build terrain models.

monks