Changelog

Full commit-level detail lives in CHANGELOG.md on GitHub — this page is just the user-facing TL;DR of each release, the same list shown in the app's own Settings → What's New.

2026-08-21Live Lighting Rework: Native-Sharpness Phong & Matcap

Live Phong/Matcap rework (renderers now labeled Live vs Legacy): per-fragment normals straight from the float DEM on MapLibre's own 128×128 drape mesh — native-hillshade sharpness. Phong composites true albedo over the basemap/hypso stack (hidden surfaces handled, specular-only no longer dims the map) with a camera-headlamp light anchor; Matcap gets correct camera anchoring at every bearing and per-fragment depth (no more summits flickering behind neighboring tiles). Also fixed: tile-seam streaks, high-pitch near-camera tile dropouts, endless tile refetch on hi-dpi. New featured bookmarks (Amazon Rivers, Willamette River) with fresh thumbnails.
Shareable BYOD links — a URL referencing a sample-library source id (e.g. ?sourceB=custom-ign-lidarhd-dtm-wms-raw) now auto-adds it to a fresh visitor's Bring-Your-Own-Data list instead of showing an empty pane, and the new ?addSources=id1,id2 param prepopulates several terrain/basemap samples at once without selecting any of them.

2026-08-20Historical Fixes, Matcap Rework, Docs Restructure

Bug fixes — historical-satellite whole-earth default camera now applies; terrain mode gates the timeline to the Raster Basemap viz mode being active; matcap's screen-locked bright blob replaced by a proper view-space lookup; endless lighting-tile refetch on hi-dpi viewports fixed (dpr-aware tile selection).
Match Colors re-applies instantly in RGB; Bookmarks gets list/grid toggles (sidebar + gallery modal); the guided tour now wraps up with Keyboard Shortcuts and docs links.
Docs — new Export & Share, Projects, Open In, Streaming & Storage Settings, and River-REM pages; nav regrouped (Features vs Advanced Features; Dev gets Custom Protocols + Historical groups).

2026-08-19Docs Site Expansion and Open-In Additions

Docs site expansion — dozens of new or re-shot real screenshots across Visualization Modes, the full guided-tour Walkthrough, Split & Compare, and more; new user-facing pages (Walkthrough, Tools, Frescoes & Artifact Scans) in the Features guide; new developer documentation (Lighting Effects, Terrain Analysis Pipeline, ESRI Wayback).
New Open In destinations (Iconem River-REM, Google Maps 3D, Google Earth Historical/3D), a ?startTour=true deep link to launch the guided tour directly, plus assorted fixes (lightbox caption links, changelog date-key collisions, KaTeX formula layout).

2026-08-16Terrain Camera Fixes, Terrain Sources Docs, and Favicon Polish

Camera sync fixes — DEM tiles arriving after terrain turns on, pane resizes, and the padding easeTo all leave the elevation reference stale. Re-anchored on idle via recalculateZoomAndCenter (holds camera position, solves for the new center/zoom — nothing moves on screen), guarded by a 1 m epsilon so padding changes and mode switches don't nudge the focus point. The view you last touched is authoritative; the others are copied wholesale from it.
Elevation is now a synced camera parameter — a terrain camera has a sixth parameter beyond center/zoom/bearing/pitch/roll (the elevation of the point it looks at), and it wasn't being forwarded in split/overlay. MapLibre freezes it for the whole drag on the moved view while re-resolving it live on every jumpTo to the others, so the panes drifted vertically apart for the duration of a drag and snapped back on release. The moved view's elevation is now forwarded explicitly.
Fixed several camera-reset edge cases: MapLibre's easeTo leaves _elevationFreeze stuck on unless freezeElevation is passed (suppressing per-frame reclamp and leaving panes in asymmetric internal state after whichever one you'd last dragged); ground-clamping bookkeeping was keyed by view id which outlives the map instance (a remounted pane stayed permanently clamped); programmatic camera commands now stand down while a pointer is held (previously jumpTo/easeTo's Map#stop() silently ate a press-and-hold gesture).
Panel open/close now animated (padding, pane rects, gutter, borders ease over 200ms); sidebar/timeline avoidance padding extended to lone view, single-row/column grids, and Overlay panes; Map B defaults to AWS terrain (no API key); new Terrain Sources docs page; favicon shape reactive to live app mode.

2026-08-16Guided Product Tour

New guided product tour (Compass icon in Settings, or auto-starts on first visit): a branching walkthrough covering the shared basics, then either the Terrain visualization tools or Historical Satellite imagery mode, chosen at a fork partway through.
Each branch ends with a Tools step listing that mode's map-based utilities (Drawing, Elevation Picker, Sun/Shadow Calculator beta, Animation, Source Info — the historical branch's subset excludes the terrain-only ones).

2026-08-14Docs Site, Featured Bookmarks, and Tells Freeze Fixes

Added a documentation site, live-linked from the app general settings.
Featured bookmarks: a curated "Featured" strip of starter viewpoints (different terrain shapes, visualization combinations, and a historical-imagery example) now sits above your own saved bookmark list.
Mound detector (Tells): new Frozen/Live toggle — pin the currently-detected candidates in place so panning/zooming doesn't keep re-querying and recomputing them.
Visiting historical-satellite.iconem.com now lands you straight in Historical Imagery mode, with its own clock-shaped favicon (matching the timeline toggle's own icon) instead of the terrain mountain.
In split/grid compare mode, clicking a basemap's name (not just its per-view toggle) now sets that source on every active view at once.

2026-08-11Histogram Color Matching in Compare and Blend

Match Colors via Histogram Matching: automatically recolors every other view onto View A's color histogram, so two different imagery sources (or two dates of the same source) no longer look noticeably darker/bluer/warmer next to each other when compared or blended.
Five color spaces to choose from: RGB is instant (a live CSS filter); HSL/HSV/LAB/LCH are slower but can match more subtle color differences. Ported from Iconem/historical-satellite's standalone histogram-matching demo.

2026-08-10N-Map Grid, Overlay blend, and export historical imagery

N-Map Grid mode: in addition to 2x1, can now also do 3x1, 4x1, or 2 rows, 2x2 up to 4x2. Gains a Grid shape, now supporting up to 8 synced map views, not just a 2-way split.
Compare and Blend's Split Mode: Off/Side/Overlay, where gutter can be horizontally dragged for clip ratio, or the pill vertical position controls map view B transparency
Blend Mode for overlaid Map View: Multiply, Difference, Soft-Light etc. Dropdown now exposes every CSS blend mode, not just a curated handful.
Export historical GeoTIFFs across a date range, with an option to generate ready-to-run gdal_translate scripts.
Optional colored map borders and a capture-date pill make it easy to tell which pane is which.

2026-08-07Historical Satellite Imagery Timeline, Terrain vs Historical Mode Picker

New "Historical Imagery" mode: scrub a real per-tile capture-date timeline bottom panel, across ESRI Wayback, Google Earth Historical, Landsat/Sentinel (HLS), Planet, and Bing.
Mode Picker: Terrain vs Historical switches the whole sidebar between Terrain Viewer and a simplified Historical Imagery layout.
Every historical basemap source feeds real attribution, including dynamically-resolved provider/date info for Wayback, Google Earth Historical, and Bing.
The light-direction XY pad itself gained a full bidirectional datetime binding: drag it and it back-solves the closest matching day-of-year/time-of-day (and the sliders still drive it forward as before), hatching every position the sun can't physically reach at the current latitude (a real day/night-boundary constraint).
Sun Shadow Calculator: new Reverse mode: click a shadow to back-solve the light direction and time of day, knowing building height. Also see the standalone sun-position estimator tool.

2026-07-31Draw export split, Colorramp Editor, Bookmarks Gallery

TerraDraw export split mode: button with a "split by layer" option.
Colorramp editor: A live session-only for quick, non-persisted ramp-stop edits.
Bookmarks gallery now flattens into one continuous grid by default.

2026-07-30COG GSD surfacing & Foldable Bookmarks Tree

COG sources now auto-show their inferred native resolution and ground-sample distance.
Bookmarks: drag-and-drop reordering, collapsible project folders, fold/expand-all, and an edit mode to keep the everyday view uncluttered.

2026-07-28Whole-Project Export, Hard Shadows & Sun Shadow Calculator

Whole-project import/export in one file (terrain/basemap sources, bookmarks, drawings, settings, with zip to embed vector drawings/local COGs as an option).
Hard Shadows: a new visualization mode casting real hard shadows from the shared light direction, independent of the Sun Shadow Calculator tool.
Sun Shadow Calculator: pick a point + an object's height, get its shadow at the current sun position.
SVF/Openness gain faster precision, plus a new Principal Components (PCA) relief-mode family (Blobness, Eigenvalue Ratio, Dominant Orientation, Shape Index).
Terrain Analysis's Settings description split into 3 subheadings (Surface derivatives, Neighborhood statistics, Principal Components) to match.

2026-07-28Bookmarks & Feature Iterator

View bookmarks: save/restore full viewport + viz state, sidebar list + gallery.
Feature Iterator: step through a drawn/imported layer's features one at a time (select, delete, arrow-key nav, fly-to-next).
A compute-time estimate now shows for slow modes (SVF, Openness, Local Dominance) while their tiles are still loading.

2026-07-28Linked Terrain/Basemap Sources & Non-Geo Mode

Linked terrain/basemap source pairing: for paired datasets like a fresco's DTM plus its own albedo photo, picking one auto-selects the other. Part of this app's non-geo mode, a complementary viewer to RTI/PTM tools like OpenLime (not a replacement) for viewing normal-map/albedo photogrammetry data as if it were terrain. See issue #1 for the feature-parity tracker, and a real example on OpenLime itself for comparison.

2026-07-27Contours extended, Local Persistence, Routing & New Tools

Contours extended to local/BYOD COG sources via a dedicated worker, plus line-weight and color controls.
Local COG files and vector layers now survive a reload via OPFS persistence.
Routing mode for Elevation Picker: a BRouter/Valhalla road-following route (foot/cycle/vehicle profiles) between two picked points instead of a straight line, with a routed elevation profile along it.
New tools: Source Info panel (states which underlying provider a composited Mapterhorn/AWS tile actually came from, not just the mosaic's name), Plane Slicer (choose Local Relief Model or raw altitude as the reference plane; Contours share the same choice), Local Dominance relief mode (later sped up via pyramid octaves).
Shared custom colorramp editor extended across every viz mode.
A cancel button for DTM export appears after ~1.5s if the export is still running.

2026-07-27RiverREM

The footer's "Also see" links now explicitly describe RiverREM (repo), a separate app built for a similar use case, on rivers instead of terrain: draw or import a river centerline (or fetch one from OSM via Overpass/QLever, the longest named waterway, or all matches), smooth/interpolate its water-surface elevation (WSE) along that line, then de-trend the DEM against it (REM = DEM − WSE) to get a Relative Elevation Model highlighting fluvial terraces a flat elevation map hides, pure client-side, or server-based via OpenTopography's Python RiverREM.

2026-07-22Matcap/Phong Lighting Rebuilt as Live WebGL Shaders

Matcap/Phong lighting was rebuilt as live WebGL shaders, then reverted the same morning to a GPU-accelerated raster-tile approach after the WebGL version proved unstable; native MapLibre Hillshade was restored as its own mode alongside it.

2026-07-21Theme Editor

New standalone Theme Editor: live Tailwind v4/shadcn theming with tweakcn/shadcnstudio presets.

2026-07-18Relief Visualization Split & Sidebar Labels

Relief Visualization split into its own separate group (Sky View Factor SVF, Openness) from Terrain-analysis (Curvature, TPI, Roughness, Det-Hessian, Blobness).
Relief Visualization and Terrain Analysishave a Basic/Advanced collapse toggle to either just activate/deactivate the additional sub-modes, or go further and edit their symbology.
Keyboard shortcuts: Shift-tap to peek at the raster basemap, Ctrl-tap to hide every overlay down to just the basemap. See all keyboard shortcuts in the dedicated section of General Settings modal.
Labeled Sources / Options / Detectors / Tools sidebar dividers for scanning a long control panel.

2026-07-18TerraDraw Multi-Layer Drawing

TerraDraw becomes multi-layer: drawing and GeoJSON import now target whichever layer is active.

2026-07-15Local COG (BYOD) Terrain Sources

Local COG (BYOD) terrain sources: load a .cog.tif straight off disk, no upload.
Viz-mode tile caching: an LRU of finished viz-mode tile bytes that makes re-toggling a mode instant instead of recomputing it.

2026-07-12Mound Local Tops Detector Beta

Experimental "Tells" archaeological mound detector, gated behind a Beta toggle: flags candidate mounds by finding local extrema/maxima of the LRM, then veto-filters them by Blobness, Plan Curvature/Divergence, and Det-Hessian to reject saddles and ridges.

2026-07-11Terrain Analysis: Curvature Suite Expanded

Terrain-analysis suite: Profile curvature (rate of slope change along the steepest-descent direction, i.e. flow acceleration) and Plan curvature (rate of aspect change across contours, i.e. flow convergence/divergence), plus TPI and Roughness; Det-Hessian and Blobness followed.

2026-07-10Local Relief Model (LRM) Relative Elevation to neighborhood

Local Relief Model (LRM): a new relief mode isolating local bumps from the regional trend. This is compute-optimized by subtracting the elevation tiles altitude at native viewport resolution from the bi-linearly interpolated trend, requested from a lower resolution version of the pyramid. User can control how many levels lower, and sees the resulting gaussian mean scale he chooses.

2026-07-09Client-Side DSM Export, Project Presets, Basemap Overlays & Elevation Picker

Client-side GeoTIFF export without Titiler, and shareable per-project embed configs.
Project embed presets: ?project= links can seed a fully preconfigured view:
- Mapterhorn Globe (zoomed-out world view, Mapterhorn-only, source pickers hidden),
- Dura Frescoes Viewer (fixed 2D non-geo fresco view, most terrain-analysis tooling hidden),
- and a minimal Example Embed, see lib/projects.json.
Basemap overlays (samples ships demo radar, trails, stamen watercolor) that layer on top of any basemap instead of replacing it.
Elevation Picker: click-to-sample elevation at point or delta between two-points

2026-07-08Slope Visualization Mode

Slope visualization mode: launched as a PlanTopo server-hosted overlay (computed offline from Mapterhorn), upgraded to a client-side "Slope and More" v2: a custom MapLibre protocol computed directly from whichever terrain source is active (BYOD included), rather than PlanTopo's own fixed dataset. Later grew into the full curvature/TPI/roughness/LRM/Tells suite above.

Slope-angle visualization mode

2026-07-07NextGIS QMS, Photon Geocoder, Animation Pose via URL & TileJSON

NextGIS QMS search: search and add basemaps directly from NextGIS QuickMapServices public catalog;
Switched search location geocoder to Photon geocoder.
Camera/animation poses are now URL-shareable.
Added TileJSON data source type
Added new colorramps CET/SDR ramps

2026-02-19Light-Direction Spherical Control via XYPad

Light-direction control for Hillshade via XYPad: drag a 2D pad to set illumination azimuth/elevation, instead of two separate sliders.

Dragging the XYPad to set light azimuth/elevation

2026-02-19Animation, Video Export & Minimap

Animation Capabilities, with keyframe-based (Complete vs Smooth) video export.
Video export tries MediaBunny first (real muxed MP4/H.264 via WebCodecs), falling back to raw WebCodecs (H.264, no muxing) if MediaBunny throws, then all the way to MediaRecorder (WebM) if the browser lacks WebCodecs entirely.
Minimap with main viewport footprint/frustum bbox shown, fully configurable.
Finer Terrarium quantization (4mm vs. TerrainRGB 10cm) shipped as a High-Precision toggle.

2026-02-18Drawing Tools via TerraDraw, Sources Samples & Contours Consolidation

Drawing Tools via TerraDraw: draw shapes, points, and more; import/export geojson features.
Load Sample buttons added to the terrain/basemap source pickers with a variety of nation-wide sources.
Contours reworked and consolidated into their own "Contours & GeoGrid" section.
Fold/expand-all for every sidebar section, with collapsed state now persisted via jotai atomWithStorage.

2026-02-13BYOD Basemaps & WMS/DTM-DSM Sources

BYOD basemaps TMS, WMS, COG, finalized as their own custom-source type via custom protocol, alongside the existing BYOD terrain sources.
WMS raw-elevation support (e.g. IGN France) now stream as MapLibre raster-dem via a custom MapLibre protocol. Standalone demo: maplibre-raster-dem-wms-float32-generic.html.
DTM-DSM LidarHD selector in samples
Graticule layer
Share section

2025-11-18cpt-city Colorramp Library

Adding a large open-license colorramp library, cpt-city, with classic, topo, topobath, top qgis, and temp groups.

2025-11-14Geomatico COG Protocol vs. Titiler

Offer the choice to stream COG via Geomatico's native MapLibre COG-protocol vs. Titiler. The direct client protocol avoids Titiler's rate limiting and is faster (no middleware hop), but is less permissive: it only reads COGs already in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857), where Titiler can reproject on the fly server-side.

2025-11-07BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) Terrain Sources

Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Terrain sources let users import their own TMS, COG remote endpoint terrain sources.

2025-11-04Initial Launch, Viz Modes, Shareable URLs & Split Mode

Initial launch with all user-controls on one foldable, sidebar control panel. UI transparency on slider change enables better-feedback, 2D/3D/Globe map projection modes.
Terrain visualization modes: Hillshade (Combined, Standard, Aspect Multidir colors, Igor, Basic), Hypsometric color-relief, Raster Basemap
Sources for Terrain (Terrarium /TerrainRGB): Mapterhorn, Mapbox, Maptiler. AWS Terrain Tiles.
Source for Raster Basemaps: Google, Bing, ESRI, Mapbox, Here, OSM
Shareable URLs, State persisted to URL via nuqs so any shared url results in visually the exact same map.
Split Mode: A/B side-by-side comparison, originally built for comparing the same location's resolution/quality across different terrain sources (Mapterhorn vs. Mapbox/MapLibre terrain-RGB vs. AWS Terrain Tiles).