About this release

This 2023 release of LuciadLightspeed features support for Additional Military Layers (AML) version 3 data, including visualization according to STANAG 7170. In addition, this release includes security upgrades, and bundles a set of smaller enhancements, all based on your feedback.

luciad portfolio
Figure 1. The Luciad portfolio.

Benefits of the new features

Improvements for customers in the maritime domain

Additional Military Layers (AML) is an S-57 product used for the encoding of military nautical data. Typically, this data is combined with the ENC data, also encoded in S-57.

With this 2023.0 release, LuciadLightspeed extends its support to include AML v3. This includes support for data following the AML v3 domain model and visualization as defined in STANAG 7170.

aml
Figure 2. Additional Military Layers (AML) is a S-57 product used for the encoding of military nautical data.

LuciadLightspeed now also applies the proper scale ranges for the levels in the AML cell files that are in a CATALOG.031. Before, AML data had no scale range. Usually, these scale ranges are beneficial to your application, both to reduce loading time and to reduce visual clutter. For details, see TLcdS52DisplaySettings.getScaleDenominators.

Articles to get you started

Because this is an update to an existing feature, the article What are S52, S57, S63, IENC and AML? has been updated to reflect the changes.

Minimum supported Java version

For many years, we have fixed the minimum supported Java version for LuciadLightspeed to 8. With this release, we would like to give an advance notification that the LuciadLightspeed 2023.x releases will be the last releases supporting Java 8. For the LuciadLightspeed 2024 releases, we plan to raise the minimum version to Java 17. We will continue to support both the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK.

Going forward, we aim to support the latest Java LTS version in our latest release. The minimum JDK/JRE requirements will never change with a minor upgrade — an upgrade from 2022.0 to 2022.1, for instance — or with a patch release of LuciadLightspeed.

This also applies to LuciadFusion.

If you have any further questions or feedback on this topic, please contact the Luciad Product Management team at product.management.luciad.gsp@hexagon.com.

Articles to get you started

The documentation on Hardware and software requirements includes a new section that describes our policy and includes an overview of the supported Java versions for the various LuciadLightspeed product versions.

Obfuscation of your deployed application is now optional

As a final step in developing a LuciadLightspeed application, you can obfuscate the code. This is an optional step that can bring several benefits for your application:

  • Protection of the source code of an application from reverse engineering.

  • Reduction of application footprint. Obfuscated names are shorter and can significantly reduce the application footprint. Obfuscation programs, such as ProGuard, also allow for other optimizations. One example is “shrinking” which removes unused byte code. This can also drastically reduce the application footprint. Experiments with Lucy resulted in a functional Lucy application that was less than 4MB in size.

As of June 2023, this obfuscation step is optional.

Articles to get you started

The packaging instructions for LuciadLightspeed have been updated to reflect the changed policy for obfuscation.

Other improvements and notices

Minimum OpenGL version increase

The minimum OpenGL version required by ILspView is now 4.2. GPUs or drivers which do not support this version will no longer be able to use the hardware-accelerated Lightspeed view. For more information, please contact product.management.luciad.gsp@hexagon.com.

Oculus no longer supported

LuciadLightspeed no longer supports Oculus devices. If you have projects requiring VR/AR/XR, please contact product.management.luciad.gsp@hexagon.com.

ECW model decoder upgrade

The TLcdECWModelDecoder has been upgraded to use ERDAS ECW JP2 SDK 6.1.

Security upgrades

Several dependencies of LuciadLightspeed received security upgrades. For details, we refer to the release notes.

AIXM 5.1 holding patterns on GXY and Lightspeed maps

AIXM 5.1 holding patterns are now visualized in GXY and Lightspeed maps, with an oval icon that aligns with the turn direction and inbound course.

holdingpattern
Figure 3. AIXM 5.1 holding pattern.