A virtual globe, inside your application

vgl is a lightweight, open-source C++ library that streams level-of-detail terrain and imagery on the WGS84 ellipsoid and draws it with OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL 2, Direct3D 11 or Ogre, behind a stable C API.

Try the live demo Get started Download 1.0

MIT licensed. Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and the web.

The globe from orbit over Europe, with clouds and the atmosphere's glow along the limb

Why vgl

Your window, your loop

Your application keeps its window, main loop, camera and render target. vgl draws into the render pass you are in, and never presents, swaps or clears.

C first

The stable ABI is a C API of opaque handles and result codes, compatible within each major version. A header-only C++ wrapper adds RAII, spans and enum classes.

Precise at every scale

Double-precision geometry on the CPU, tile-relative vertices and logarithmic or reversed-Z depth: no jitter and no z-fighting, from orbit down to the ground.

Small and predictable

Two runtime dependencies, stb_image and Zstandard. No global state, no threads or connections of its own, every allocation through your allocator, and memory within the budgets you set.

Your data, your server

The bundled baker turns Copernicus DEM, GEBCO and your own imagery into sharded packs that load from disk or from any web server with HTTP range requests, with a disk cache for offline use.

Built to extend

Draw with your own renderer through the render interface, and bring your own I/O, task scheduling, allocators and logging: the built-in parts use the same public interfaces.

What it draws

The Sognefjord in Norway from a few kilometres up, with haze over the mountains — The Sognefjord, on Copernicus GLO-30 terrain and Sentinel-2 cloudless imagery, with the atmosphere's haze.

Looking across the Alps to the curved horizon, with clouds and the blue limb glow — The Alps toward the horizon: clouds, the limb's glow and the stars, drawn by every backend.

Terrain coloured by height with contour lines, and the sea surface — Colours by height, contour lines above mean sea level, and the optional sea surface at the geoid.

The terrain mesh as a wireframe, with tile boundaries in yellow — The wireframe debug view: each tile's grid, and the tiles' boundaries in yellow.

Backends and platforms

Backend	Graphics API	Platforms
OpenGL / OpenGL ES	OpenGL 3.3, OpenGL ES 3.0, WebGL 2	Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, browsers
Direct3D 11	Direct3D 11 (feature level 11_0)	Windows
Ogre	Ogre 14 on OpenGL 3+ and Direct3D 11	Windows, Linux
Your own	Anything, through the render interface	Anywhere the core builds

Get started

Install

Download a release archive for Windows, Linux or macOS, use the vcpkg port or the Conan recipe, or build from source with CMake. Then link it:

find_package(vgl 1 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(my_app PRIVATE
    vgl::vgl vgl::defaults vgl::gl)

Draw

Create a thread pool and a file reader, and a context with them.
Add packs: elevation, the geoid and imagery.
Create a backend on your device.
Every frame: set the view, update, and draw inside your render pass.
Show the credits of the data in view.

Getting started walks through a complete program.

Bake and host your own data

vgl hosts no datasets: you bake packs from the sources you choose and serve them yourself. The baker reads any raster GDAL reads, converts vertical datums, and writes deterministic packs; vgl-bake check tests a web server the way vgl and browsers read it, and a reference server configuration for Caddy is included.

vgl-bake bake glo30-norway.json --jobs 16
vgl-bake check https://packs.example.org/glo30-norway

The baker · Hosting packs · Reference server

Documentation

Integrator's guide Building, embedding, backends, baking and hosting, in the wiki. API reference Every function and structure, generated from the headers. Design and specifications The design document, the C API conventions, the render interface and the pack format. Changelog What each release changed, and the known limitations.