[Serious Gaming] Vessel Tracking Visualisation

I work for a non-profit in the UK and one of the projects we are working on is sustainability of the oceans, part of that involves creating a system that uses satellite data to track vessels at sea. The idea is that we are able to see who is behaving and who isn't and act accordingly. More info here for those curious.

Our previous version used standard web technologies to put dots on maps but as we've a 11520x3240px video wall powered by three NVidia K6000 graphics cards I figured it's time we build something far cooler for the visualisation and Unity was my first though! I've a built a simple tile renderer to show WMS tiles in game so that we can reuse part of our GIS stack but the biggest hurdle I'm hitting is with the rendering of the vessels.

What we need is to render a representation of a vessel on the screen, moving across the map and leaving a track behind. At the minute we've around 200,000 vessels but that's due to grow as more data sources become available.

I've tried a number of different options, all with their own benefits and issues, which I'm starting to document now but I was wondering how people would approach this issue and if there are any resources available for serious gaming on this scale?

Thanks,
Keegan

 

I guess i'd try with dx11 shaders (to display that many ships as billboards and those dots)

or this way:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/turboforest-unity-fast-billboard-forest-rendering.224165

 

Cool, thanks for the links. I've gone back to one of the solutions I tested and thrown billboards in instead of the default particles and it seems to increase performance. It does indeed look like I'll have to learn a lot more to get this working properly, I'm only a few months in to using Unity so writing a custom shader will be a task for the future I think.

For now I'll continue with our brute force method, it's based on this tutorial and I'm performing a lerp to calculate and redraw the particles in the right location;
http://www.catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/graphs/

I'll have a proper look at the forest code too, that looks like it will be very useful!

 

also here's the old dx11 shader samples from unity,
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1119248/DX11Examples-4.0.0b7.zip