Outerra Engine > FAQ
General
cameni:
1. What is Outerra?
Outerra is the name of our company; we are a small indie developer, currently focusing on the development of game engine known as Outerra engine
2. What is Outerra Engine?
Outerra Engine is a global world rendering engine capable of seamless real time rendering of planets from space down to centimeter details on the surface. It can use arbitrary resolution of elevation data, refining it further to the finest resolution using fractal algorithms and procedural techniques. See full feature list here.
3. What is procedural generation, and how does the engine differ from other games/engines?
Procedural generation is a concept of generating data algorithmically, rather than manually, in order to reduce amount of manual modeling or to generate detail when there are no data at given level of detail. Procedural generation can involve various fractal or algorithmic techniques; in OE it is used to refine terrain, generate the trees or for water rendering and more.
The engine differs mainly in that in OE the whole world will be ready from the beginning and you start with modding it, whereas with common engines you usually start with an empty, constrained level.
4. Multiplatform support
Currently the engine runs on Windows, but it uses only the portable libraries such as OpenGL. Support for Mac/Linux platforms will be coming in future, it shouldn't be problematic as long as there are working drivers for OpenGL 3.3.
5. How to get updates on the status of Outerra?
You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter:
There is also an Outerra Blog that gets updated with news and more technical posts.
The forums are the best way to follow the progress if you want to get a more in-depth explanation and/or to participate in a discussion with us.
Note: members can post replies to this topic, these will be later deleted and answered or used to refine the existing answers if deemed worthy.
FoxMag:
Still working under Windows only?
cameni:
Yep. At the moment we have too few resources to expand the support, and given that Macs don't support OpenGL 3.3 yet ..
Webbstre:
How far is the engine intended to go as far as living things? Once all the terrain stuff is taken care of I'd love to see things like ecosystems and people and all sorts of things to interact with. Kind of like the original intentions behind Spore's development.
cameni:
--- Quote from: Webbstre on March 17, 2012, 10:09:51 am ---How far is the engine intended to go as far as living things? Once all the terrain stuff is taken care of I'd love to see things like ecosystems and people and all sorts of things to interact with. Kind of like the original intentions behind Spore's development.
--- End quote ---
That's probably more game-specific, but of course needs some support form the engine. Once the terrain and biomes are right, we'll surely think about it.
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