[general]
name=PlanetX
qgisMinimumVersion=3.36
qgisMaximumVersion=4.99
description=3D globe for QGIS: satellite imagery, terrain, atmosphere, borders, roads and labels, project layers on the globe, My Places, ruler, map synchronization, place search and grab-the-Earth navigation
version=0.40.0
author=ООО «Информ++»
email=xbbster@gmail.com
about=A 3D globe in its own window inside QGIS. The whole Earth is shown
      from space down to single streets, with terrain relief and hill
      shading, a glowing atmosphere around the planet and sky at the
      horizon. Esri World Imagery opens by default as an example base map.
      It can be switched to OpenStreetMap or any XYZ Tiles connection set
      up in QGIS.
      The Layers panel adds borders, place names,
      water names, roads with their numbers, railways, airports, rivers,
      lakes, peaks and protected areas from OpenFreeMap vector tiles,
      a coordinate grid, stars with the Milky Way, clouds and land and
      sea temperature from NASA GIBS. 3D buildings from
      OpenStreetMap rise from the ground near the camera.
      The ruler measures ground length and heading, the elevation
      profile of a path shows ascent and slopes. Coordinates show
      in degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, UTM or MGRS. Places
      have icons and a time of their own with a time slider,
      and a tour can be recorded from the screen.
      The Sun row
      lights terrain and buildings by the position of the sun with
      a dark night side, the 3D path and 3D polygon of the ruler
      measure over roofs and walls of buildings.
      The Body icon puts the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, the
      Galilean moons, seven moons of Saturn, Ceres or Vesta in place of
      the Earth, with global NASA and USGS imagery and terrain of Mars
      and the Moon from MOLA and LOLA heights, and opens the starry sky seen from the
      centre of the celestial sphere: the Milky Way, stars,
      constellation lines and names, the Sun, the Moon and the planets
      at the chosen time. The Demo icon with an academic cap opens
      prepared scenes: Perm, Boca Chica and the Japan Trench with a
      section across the subduction zone on the Earth, landing sites
      on Mars and the Moon, Jezero crater on Mars, constellations and bright objects in the
      sky.
      Labels stay upright, do not overlap and hide behind mountains and
      the horizon. The label language follows QGIS or is chosen from
      15 languages and local names.
      Layers of the current project, vector and raster, lie on the globe
      in the map order of QGIS, labels of vector layers stay level like
      city names.
      Drag the Earth with the left mouse
      button, it keeps rotating by inertia after release. The wheel zooms
      to the point under the cursor, the middle button or Shift with the
      left button turns and tilts the view. A double click zooms to a
      point, the right button zooms, Ctrl looks around, arrows, PageUp,
      PageDown, N, U and R move the view. The compass ring,
      look and move sticks and the height slider stay in the corner of
      the view as a faint outline. The globe follows the QGIS map window or leads it, in any
      map coordinate system. A click in the Identify mode lists the
      features of the project layers under the point and selects them on
      the map, selection on the map shows on the globe.
      My Places keep placemarks, paths, polygons and
      measurements in a shared file of the QGIS profile. They are drawn
      by clicks on the globe. The ruler measures lines, paths,
      polygons and circles on the WGS84 ellipsoid. Save view puts a
      placemark that restores the height, heading and tilt. Tours fly
      over My Places and along paths. A snapshot of the view goes to a
      file or into a QGIS layout. KML and KMZ open into My Places and a
      folder saves back to KML. Places rise above the ground and extend
      to it as walls and blocks. Point layers with a time field show as
      growing tracks along the QGIS Temporal Controller. A scene saves
      the whole view to a file, a tour records to PNG frames.
      Type a place name or coordinates in the Search field and the
      camera flies there smoothly, the place found gets a red pin.
      A PDF manual with pictures in Russian and English opens from the
      About window.
      Requires OpenGL 3.3 and PyOpenGL, which ships with QGIS on Windows.
      Tested on QGIS 3.36 (Qt 5) and 4.0 (Qt 6).
      Imagery: Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User
      Community. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, vector tiles
      OpenFreeMap. Terrain: Mapzen Terrain Tiles (SRTM, GMTED, ETOPO1
      and other sources). Clouds: NASA GIBS, VIIRS. Stars: Yale Bright
      Star Catalogue. Milky Way: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
      Scientific Visualization Studio, Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC.
      Mars: NASA, USGS, Viking MDIM2.1. Moon: USGS, LRO LOLA. Tiles of
      both: OpenPlanetaryMap. Mars heights: NASA MGS MOLA MEGDR. Moon
      heights: NASA LRO LOLA GDR. Other bodies: global mosaics of USGS
      Astrogeology and NASA Photojournal from MESSENGER, Magellan,
      Galileo, Voyager, Cassini and Dawn data. Constellations and star names:
      d3-celestial, © Olaf Frohn. Planets: JPL orbital elements.
      Developed with the support of Inform++ LLC (www.informpp.ru).
tracker=https://github.com/Valery35/planetx/issues
repository=https://github.com/Valery35/planetx
homepage=https://www.informpp.ru/главная-страница/qgis-planetx
tags=3d,globe,earth,mars,moon,mercury,venus,jupiter,europa,titan,sky,stars,constellations,planets,openstreetmap,osm,terrain,dem,satellite,imagery,atmosphere,navigation,labels,vector tiles,opengl
category=Web
icon=icon.png
experimental=False
deprecated=False
changelog=0.40.0 Tracks and project layers with QGIS time follow the
      time slider of the globe. A track grows up to the right handle,
      a layer with time shows only its objects within the slider range,
      on the picture and in the labels. The QGIS Temporal Controller no
      longer acts on the globe. A scene keeps the slider range.
      0.39.0 The Data sources… button of the View properties window
      opens a window with all globe sources, their terms of use and an
      availability check. It sets own terrain (Terrarium or Mapbox
      Terrain-RGB) and an own vector base (OpenMapTiles TileJSON), adds,
      edits and removes base maps.
      0.38.0 The Fires row of the Planet of Fire group shows fire
      spots over the last 24 hours from the NASA FIRMS feed. Fires are
      chosen in the same list as the NASA themes, either the fires or one
      theme is on. The colour and size of a dot show the radiative power,
      the spots stand on the time slider, a click in the Identify mode
      shows the power and the image time. A layer legend shows also when
      it is the first one on the legend panel.
      0.37.0 With the Sun row city lights shine on the night side
      of the Earth from the NASA Black Marble image. In the twilight they
      fade together with the night, under clouds they are weaker.
      0.36.0 A height raster of the QGIS project becomes the globe
      terrain within its extent, the Globe terrain item of the raster menu
      in the Project layers section. At the edge of the extent the heights
      change smoothly to the common terrain, within the extent the terrain
      is more detailed, down to the raster pixel. The Quarry, own terrain
      demo is a synthetic 1 m survey of a quarry with benches and a waste
      dump near Berezniki. The right-click menu on the globe and dragging
      of ruler points, new placemark vertices, Earth cutaway corners and
      ground overlay corners work again, in 0.34.0 and 0.35.0 they broke
      off with an error. A click on the base map checkbox no longer opens
      a Python error window.
      0.35.0 A ground overlay, or all ground overlays of a folder,
      goes into the QGIS project as GeoTIFF raster layers by the corners
      of the image, in the PlanetX - images group. The Aral Sea demo
      shows the three kinds of overlays by links to web addresses. These
      are MODIS images of 2000, 2014 and 2023 as radio buttons, a photo
      of the ships at Moynaq and a basin map on the screen. QGIS 3.36 no
      longer crashes on exit when My Places hold ground overlays.
      0.34.0The Add submenu of a My Places folder adds a ground
      overlay, a photo and a screen overlay. A ground overlay is placed
      by a box with rotation or by four corners, with handles to move,
      rotate and stretch it, as in Google Earth. The image is kept in
      the places file or as a link to a file or web address. Google
      Earth overlays open from KML and KMZ and save back with images.
      The time slider is one time of the view: a NASA theme takes the
      day of the right handle, placemarks and earthquakes the range.
      Without events the slider has one handle and steps over the theme
      series. The legends stand as one panel. The assistant button left
      the Search field, a topic typed there becomes placemarks, the
      assistant settings are in the View properties window.
      0.33.0 Paleogeography shows land relief and sea depths of
      the past after the PALEOMAP PaleoDEM maps, up to 540 million years
      ago. Changing the age and playing ages no longer stall the view.
      The Planet of Fire, Planet of Water, Gases and Land and Life groups
      of the Layers section show 21 NASA GIBS themes - smoke, carbon
      monoxide, precipitation, snow, sea ice, gases, vegetation, night
      lights and others. The day of a theme is set by its own slider,
      a legend stands in the corner of the view.
      0.32.0 The Subsurface mode icon shows drill holes along
      their survey, bed roofs, section walls with images, tunnels and
      a cut block under the surface, with a transparent surface and
      a camera underground. The data are ordinary project layers,
      checked layers go under the globe in 3D and take their style
      and labels from QGIS. A polygon of My Places cuts the model,
      a path puts a section wall, the Model section window shows the
      beds along a path. The Demo icon opens Permian deposits with
      a tour and Vegas Loop tunnels. The Manual link of the About
      window opens the PDF in the system viewer.
      0.31.0 A topic in the Search line for which no places are
      found, for example Voyages of Columbus, turns into placemarks at
      once. Placemarks that the assistant proposes in a conversation
      show below the Search line with the Write to My Places link.
      While the Properties window of a placemark, path or polygon is
      open, its vertices can be dragged on the globe, OK writes the
      shape too. The Edit shape and Rename items left the menus, the
      name and the shape are changed in the Properties window.
      0.30.0 Paleogeography shows continents without holes or
      water strips inside, with coasts four times finer, about 5 km at
      the equator. An age opens in a fraction of a second instead of
      6-25 s. Relief is off in this mode, and the loading icon shows
      while a map loads.
      0.29.0 The Search line suggests your places and earlier
      queries while you type, and stars and constellations in the sky.
      Enter on the exact name of your place flies to it without a
      network request. Assistant places are richer: up to 100 places,
      routes along the real path, territories as polygons and times
      wherever they are known. Route stages grow on the time slider.
      The answer arrives as a stream with a count of places and a Stop
      link that keeps the places already complete. After a search by
      name, the Make places on "topic" link turns a topic into
      places. KML tracks gx:Track open as lines with a time span.
      Assistant places are read when the model writes spaces after
      commas, time inside a line, a polygon without an outer boundary
      or HTML in a description. Years before the common era are written
      correctly, and years longer than four digits are read.
      0.28.0 The Plate boundaries row shows the lithospheric
      plate boundaries after the PB2002 model: red where plates move
      apart, green along transform faults, blue where they converge.
      Plate names show as labels. The Features window shows the
      boundary type, the plate pair and the speed in mm/yr.
      0.27.2 The plugin works as in 0.27.1. Stress checks of
      the base map loading are added for the developers.
      0.27.1 The assistant is one button by the Search field.
      A click makes places from a description, the arrow opens the
      conversation and the settings. The assistant icon is no longer
      on the icon bar. Clear My Places… removes all placemarks and
      folders after a confirmation.
      0.27.0 A button by the Search field makes places from a
      description, for example "the voyage of Columbus". The model
      answers with one KML document, the places appear in My Places
      and on the globe at once and the camera flies to them. Events
      carry their dates, the time slider opens on them. The Cancel
      link below the field removes the places. The Demo icon opens
      the Japan Trench with earthquakes and an Earth cutaway across
      the subduction zone. A scene keeps the cutaway sector.
      0.26.0 The Search field understands requests in words, for
      example "show a section across the Japan Trench". The request
      goes to the assistant, the answer appears below the field. Place
      names and coordinates are found as before. The assistant works
      with Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, OpenRouter and an own service of the
      OpenAI Chat format, for example Ollama on this computer.
      OpenRouter with free models is chosen by default, its key is
      free. Ollama works without a key and without the internet. The
      Assistant window shows the conversation, the service, model and
      key are in the Assistant settings window. The key is kept in the
      QGIS profile settings without the master password by default.
      0.25.1 The Assistant icon opens a conversation with the
      Claude or Grok AI model. On a request in words the model flies,
      switches Layers rows, sets the Earth cutaway and sections and
      answers about points and earthquakes. It proposes placemarks
      as KML, they are written after confirmation. An API key of
      your own is needed, it is kept in the QGIS password manager.
      The Features window also shows My Places placemarks,
      earthquake foci, the Moho, crust and slab under the point.
      The Paleogeography row shows the coastlines of the past up to
      a billion years ago. The globe window always opens on today's
      Earth.
      0.25.0 The Earthquakes row of the Layers panel shows
      the earthquakes of the last 30 days from the USGS feed at their
      depth, coloured by depth and sized by magnitude. The Earth
      section row takes a sector out of the Earth and shows the crust,
      mantle, core and subducting slabs on its faces, its corners are
      dragged with the mouse. Section down in the menu of a path draws
      a section of the Earth along the path in a window and as a wall
      on the globe.
      Terrain shows sea and ocean depths under translucent water.
      Vertices in the New placemark window are dragged with the mouse,
      the circle in the middle of a segment adds a vertex, a click on
      the first point closes the shape. A right click on the globe
      opens a menu, Edit shape there edits a saved placemark, path or
      polygon. The globe updates automatically by default.
      0.24.1 The Demo icon has a Jezero crater scene on Mars
      with the Perseverance landing site, an elevation profile across
      the crater, a point for the viewshed, a flight around and the
      slope colouring. Depressions of Mars and the Moon deeper than
      3 km, such as Isidis and Hellas, are no longer covered by a
      blurred patch of imagery.
      0.24.0 Terrain analysis. Slope and Aspect rows of the
      Layers panel colour the Earth, Mars and the Moon by terrain
      slope classes or by the compass direction slopes face. Viewshed
      from here in the menu of a point placemark colours the places
      seen from it green and the hidden ones red, with observer and
      target heights. Insolation shows the hours of direct sunlight
      per day for chosen dates, with mountain shadows. The point of the
      elevation profile no longer jumps to earlier places of the same
      height.
      0.23.0 Folders of My Places have a properties window:
      name, description, view, allow expanding and show contents as
      option buttons, with radio buttons in the list. A double click
      or Fly to goes to the folder view or frames its places. The
      folder menu has Add, Cut, Snapshot folder view and Sort A-Z,
      folder properties are kept in KML. The Base map group of the Layers panel switches
      imagery at once. Add tile source opens a window that takes a tile
      address in any form, shows a world mosaic, finds the most detailed
      level and saves the source as a QGIS XYZ Tiles connection. The
      tour bar and the time slider have the same blue buttons, the time
      slider plays in a loop.
      0.21.0 Sixteen more bodies in the Body menu: Mercury,
      Venus, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Mimas, Enceladus,
      Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Iapetus, Ceres and Vesta, with global
      NASA and USGS imagery. The Earth heads the menu, other bodies sit
      in short submenus. Jupiter fits the view as a whole.
      0.20.0 Mars and the Moon have terrain: mountains,
      craters and plains from NASA MOLA and LOLA heights, with the same
      vertical scale as on the Earth. The loop button on the tour bar
      repeats the tour from the first stop. Closing the globe window
      on Mars or the Moon no longer ends with an error.
      0.19.0 The Body icon of the icon bar puts Mars or the
      Moon in place of the Earth, with their own imagery, and a place
      keeps its body. The Sky item shows the starry sky from the centre
      of the celestial sphere: the Milky Way, stars, constellation
      lines and names, the Sun, the Moon and the planets at the time
      set by the time slider or the computer clock. Places, tours and
      tour recording work in the sky. The Demo icon with an academic
      cap opens prepared scenes: Perm and Boca Chica, landing sites on
      Mars and the Moon, constellations and bright objects in the
      sky.
      0.18.0 Sun light with the night side of the Earth by
      the time slider or the clock. 3D path and 3D polygon of the
      ruler over roofs and walls of 3D buildings, kept in My Places
      and KML.
      0.17.3 The placemark time slider opens with a button on
      the icon bar or by itself on a flight to a dated view, a
      closed slider shows all placemarks.
      0.17.2 The description, manual and changelog describe
      the plugin in its own words.
      0.17.1 The navigation controls in the corner of the
      view are always shown, as a faint outline away from the
      cursor and in full near it. Tooltips describe the plugin in
      its own words.
      0.17.0 Ruler with ground length, heading and dragging
      of points. Elevation profile of lines and paths. Coordinates
      in degrees, DMS, UTM or MGRS, search understands all four.
      Placemark icons, placemark time with a time slider,
      recording a tour from the screen, all kept in
      KML. The Perm demo in the Scene menu.
      0.16.0 3D buildings in the Layers panel.
      OpenStreetMap buildings rise as blocks when the camera
      is closer than 6 km to the ground, with the height from
      OpenStreetMap or from the number of floors. They are off by
      default. A scene remembers the rows of the Layers panel.
      0.15.0 Any place can have a view of its own:
      look point, range, heading and tilt. Snapshot view in the
      place menu and the Place view section of the properties set it,
      fly-to and tours follow it, KML keeps it as LookAt. A slider on
      the tour bar shows how much of the tour has passed and winds it.
      The manual explains how to make an MP4 video from recorded frames.
      0.14.0 A spinning icon to the right of the icon bar shows
      that loading goes on, it turns orange when loading stalls.
      0.13.0 Labels of vector project layers on the globe, like
      city names: level at any turn and tilt, without overlaps, with
      the text, colour and size of the layer labels in QGIS.
      0.12.0 Land and sea temperature from NASA data in the
      Layers panel, off by default. A scale in degrees Celsius is shown
      in the bottom left corner of the view. The coordinate grid with
      labels no longer breaks drawing with an error, the fault came in
      0.10.0.
      0.11.0 The Milky Way behind the Earth,
      from the NASA sky map. The sky image is downloaded once when the
      stars are first shown. Files of GitHub releases and other
      redirected tiles now load in QGIS 3.
      0.10.0 A coordinate grid: the step follows
      the camera height, lines are labelled, the equator, tropics and
      polar circles are yellow. Stars around the Earth at their places in
      the sky. Clouds from NASA imagery of the last complete day, in the
      Layers panel. Translucent own lines and walls no longer turn dark.
      0.9.0 Copy and paste in My Places: places
      and folders go to the clipboard as KML text, which can be edited in
      a text editor and pasted back. The place properties window no longer
      blocks the globe, changes show at once and a Ground - Space slider
      sets the height. A PDF manual with pictures in Russian and English
      ships with the plugin and opens from About.
      0.8.0 On-screen navigation controls: the
      compass ring with N, the look and move sticks and the height slider
      with plus and minus appear in the top right corner of the view. A
      check box in the view properties keeps them on screen. The view
      properties open from the icon bar. The About window describes the
      features, controls and requirements.
      0.7.0 Mouse and keys: double click zooms to
      a point, right drag zooms, Ctrl looks around, arrows, PageUp,
      PageDown, N, U, R and Space. The left panel has collapsible
      sections Places, Project layers and Layers. Several places are
      selected with Ctrl and Shift, deleted with Del, shown, hidden and
      dragged together. A double click on a project layer flies to it.
      A manual in Russian and English opens from About.
      0.6.1 My Places shows an icon of the kind before each name -
      placemark, path, polygon or saved view. A new placemark gets a
      numbered name at once, My placemark 1, My path 1, View 1, each kind
      counts on its own.
      0.6.0 Scenes: the whole view - camera, time, layers, settings
      and a My Places folder with its tour - saves to a file and opens on
      another computer. Database passwords stay out of the file. The
      record button on the tour bar saves the tour as PNG frames for a
      video, each frame waits for the tiles. The status line shows what
      is still loading and when loading has stalled.
      0.5.2 Growing tracks: Track in the menu of a point layer shows
      it as paths of its objects along the QGIS Temporal Controller, with
      the camera following along the motion if wanted. Labels no longer
      break drawing in QGIS 3.40 with an old PyOpenGL. No errors after the
      globe is closed. A frame no longer stops on an OpenGL error left by
      another plugin.
      0.5.1 The base map no longer stops loading and stays blurred,
      the fault came in 0.5.0. The globe turns as smoothly with large
      places, such as the regions of a country from KML, as without them.
      Place properties: name, description, colors,
      height above ground and extending to the ground, a path becomes a
      wall and a polygon a block. KML files: Open KML or KMZ puts
      the file into My Places with folders, styles and views, Save as KML
      writes a folder back.
      0.5.0 Tours: Play tour flies over the
      checked places of My Places or a folder, a saved view restores its
      height, heading and tilt, along a path the camera travels the line.
      Folders in My Places with dragging of places and folders. View
      snapshot to PNG or JPEG larger than the window, the view into a
      QGIS layout as a picture embedded in the project. Transparency and
      properties of project layers in the globe list. Hide sidebar
      button. Camera motion goes first, tiles load less often while
      moving.
      0.4.3 The plugin passes the Qt 6 check of the QGIS plugin
      repository. Nothing changes in the globe itself.
      0.4.2 My Places is a folder right under the Globe row,
      shown even when empty. Its check box shows or hides
      all places, a double click on a place flies there. Save view is a
      button of its own and puts a placemark that restores the height,
      heading and tilt. The QGIS bookmarks menu is removed.
      0.4.1 A large polygon no longer hangs QGIS while it is drawn.
      Arrow cursor over the globe, closed hand while dragging, cross for
      the ruler, new placemark and identify.
      0.4.0 My Places: placemarks, paths and
      polygons drawn on the globe and saved in a shared file. Ruler with
      line, path, polygon and circle on the WGS84 ellipsoid, measurements
      saved to My Places. QGIS bookmarks and Save view with heading and
      tilt. Selection both ways between the map and the globe. Layers as
      on the QGIS map and new layers straight to the globe. Less detailed
      imagery instead of gray tiles where detailed imagery is missing.
      0.3.2 Synchronization with the QGIS map window in any coordinate
      system. Identify features by a click on the globe. Coordinates and
      elevation under the cursor in the status line. Borders, place names
      and terrain are on by default, other layers off.
      0.3.1 Place search by name, with a red pin
      on the place found and a list of other matches. Search runs through
      Nominatim.
      0.3.0 Esri World Imagery by default. Project layers on the
      globe in the QGIS map order. Layers panel with
      borders, place and water names, roads and road numbers, railways,
      airports, rivers, lakes, peaks and protected areas. Labels
      with a choice of language. Terrain can be
      switched off, vertical exaggeration. Refresh button and automatic
      refresh. Own PlanetX toolbar.
      0.2.0 Terrain relief with hill shading, the camera stays above
      the ground. Atmosphere: glow around the planet, sky and haze at the
      horizon. Base map list with OpenStreetMap and the XYZ Tiles
      connections of QGIS, for example satellite imagery. About window.
      0.1.1 The PlanetX button is now on the Plugins toolbar. The Web
      toolbar, where it was before, is hidden in QGIS by default.
      0.1.0 First release. Globe with the OpenStreetMap base map,
      grab-the-Earth navigation with inertia, zoom to the cursor, turn
      and tilt, fly-to coordinates.
