Brahma is a 3D game engine with a rather retrofuturistic design, intended for small studios and solo developers. It's being written from scratch in C++ using standard Windows API and no third-party libraries. This technology introduces an entirely new class of low-latency real-time engines that make special timing requirements, treating frames as video fields with a target time budget of 2-4 ms each, down from 16-33 ms frame budgets normally seen in game engines. It evolves in a different way than other modern engines, rejecting conventional BSP, Z-buffer, floating-point coordinates, and most of the lame screen-space effects in favor of innovative and efficient techniques. The engine is non-Euclidean capable to some degree; also it supports true displacement mapping for sectors as a means to virtualize geometry that affects collisions. The engine is also carefully designed to be easy and convenient to develop for, yet versatile and adaptive to any needs.
Using satellite data from the web, I've made this two-gigapixel model inside Brahma engine. Entire Earth surface is mapped onto two 32768x32768 tiles stitched together, providing a resolution of ca. 600 m per pixel on the equator, with color and altitude data for each point. The resulting BHS files take up 4800 MB of memory with color mipmaps, and load in ~30 seconds from a decent HDD. As the Earth surface is mapped onto a 2x1 rectangle, the polar regions appear stretched. Usage of 8-bit indexed colors with dithering allows to greatly improve texture detail at cost of some color accuracy. And with truecolor RGB rendering, adaptive palettes will be possible, making the quality loss negligible.
The terrain scale is approximately 1 : 10,000 here, the equator line being just over 4 km across to fit the default coordinate system. Owing to engine's non-Euclidean portal support, you can put cities and other places on this map in high detail, and see them flying over the scenery like if it was one solid space.