Initial Stages

At present, I am in the initial stages of implementation, experimenting with different datasets, libraries and tools which I can use effectively. So far I have tried : SDL/OpenGL for drawing in OpenGL, vtk(visual tool kit) for simple visualizations, GDAL+OGR libs for reading/storing/writing GIS data. I'm planning to use C++ for the project. Have already downloaded some sample DEM data from the USGS GTOPO30 dataset and played with some command line gdal & ogr tools. I was able to generate some images through these tools which I then tried to read in Paraview 3.x. Next, I'm planning to try out some widget libraries like FLTK, wxWidgets and Qt for the GUI.

playing with sample data in Paraview 3.0.2

Other general thoughts: need some climate data that is useful enough to document drastic change in the physical features of the world over the ages, need some basic anthropological factors that probably influenced ancient human migration, need to establish a basic rule-based algorithm for the simulation of the migration etc..