Outerra Engine > News
Podcast about Outerra
cameni:
I must say I don't know what you mean.
Anyway. Here's a shot from above with some debug info:
The tiles directly below have resolution of 2.5km/pixel. As you get closer they are being refined, but it's still five more subdivision steps until we get to a tile that runs out of dataset resolution and starts to generate additional data using fractals. However, as you get closer the visible range shrinks and the outer tiles recede behind horizon, and so the amount of tiles doesn't grow exponentially.
richiebogie:
Cool, I think I get it!
There is one 12GB dataset, but the engine serves up the needed subset of that data as your viewpoint zooms in and out and moves across tiles. In your image above you only need 1 in 33 of the east/west elevation points and 1 in 33 of the north-south datapoints, making approximately 1 in a 1000 or 12MB of the 12GB dataset, but the engine probably sends more data in anticipation of all possible changes in view: north, south, east, west, or change of zoom.
Each tile is flat, but together they form a polyhedron resembling a sphere.
Is that correct?
cameni:
Nope, tiles aren't flat, their mesh is curved properly to the radius of earth.
richiebogie:
So I couldn't tile my bathroom floor with them! They're like pieces of orange peel.
I guess I was thinking of a sphere in blender, where objects are ultimately composed of flat polygons... but that isn't needed on this scale!
Thanks for your patience. I will let you do some developing now! I hope I haven't held up the demo!
richiebogie:
I can see that the server sends a user's computer the minimal data it requires to move from viewpoint to viewpoint. Eg. View from the moon changing to view from the surface.
But does the server require the entire dataset in memory?
If not, how does it efficiently get the data it needs out of files on the hard drive?
Are there separate sets of files for different resolutions? Eg multiple quad tree mapping could map the globe onto 6 files for least resolution for viewing from space, 24 files for the next resolution, 384 files for the next resolution for views maybe 200,000 ft above the surface etc?
For each of these resolutions you would only need to load a subset depending on viewpoint.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version