Over the weekend, I had a chance to slow down, and look at why some of the features I tried to add to Globe 1.0 weren’t working. It turned out that I wasn’t computing surface normals, so the lighting wasn’t working. As soon as I added normals, lighting started working. So I present to you Globe 1.1.1, which shows the approximate area of daylight on the earth’s surface. (Globe 1.1 failed QA because I had left some debug code in it.)
You’ll also noticed that I’ve cranked the resolution of the polygons up much higher. When I first coded Globe, I was afraid of overloading the graphics processor on the iPhone, so I used a very coarse polygon mesh for the shape of the globe. Over the weekend, I cranked up the polygons, and it still runs fine on an original iPhone. Looks great, too!
I’ve re-submitted Globe to the app store. I’ll let you know when it becomes available.