Hot on the heels of displaying a wireframe mesh of a custom triangulated Terrain map made from USGS SDTS DEM information, the next big step was to get a texture map applied. terraserver-usa.net has a WMS portal for acquire rather high-quality non-watermark DOQ (digital ortho-quad) satellite imagery of any coordinates. Knowing the precise decimal-based corrdinates of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area made it easy to acture 1:24k USGS DEM data and apply a perfectly aligned texture, hugely reduced in size.

The next step will be to do have a zoom feature so that specific terrain features and/or trails can be seen in much greater detail. Right now I'm thinking of a PIP (Picture In Picture) approach to zooming in to see greater detail, but I still want to work on the texture making it more appropriate for our purposes.

I'm now thinking that adding a WMS "service" for flash to easily acquire any US DEM data and then quickly apply satellite imagry, DRP data, DLPC data, etc... would be absolutely awesome. Not easy I'll admit - but I'm starting to think it's doable.

Warning: This has a super high triangle count so it will probably 100% CPU your older machine. Working on optimization now.