Outerra Engine > Technology

Outerra Engine Detail Features

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maxdmg:
I was wondering if you have any detail spec's of Outerra available:
Supported Texture Types :BMP, PNG, TGA, JPG, Tif or RAW  16bit 24bit or 32bit
Support for World maps to be imported Heightmaps  16bit 24bit or 32bit
If so what size 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 or larger?
Can terrain be Auto painted by the program reading a built setup file with Textures and the proper
Heightmap elevation? or can you also paint it by various brushes?

Do you support other 3rd party middleware like:
Speedtree and SpeedGrass
Emotion-FX
F-MOD
ScaleForm

Can Veg, and other assets be painted on to the terrain?
Do you support Voxels?
Is there a day/night cycle?
I saw a demo of some DX11 water,  Is that the water you have tied to the engine?
Do you have the ability to create lakes and rivers at various altitudes?
Sorry for the long list,  But I really have more questions than this I fig we would get these out
of the way first.  8

cameni:
Welcome, Max

Imported heightmaps have to be georeferenced, but there's no limit to their resolution. For example, currently we use remapped data imported from heightfield with 1km resolution for oceans and 90m resolution for land. That's some 432,000 x 432,000 pixels for land data for whole Earth minus the oceans.

Outerra is not just a terrain engine, it's a planetary engine capable of displaying whole planet with complete level of detail from orbit to surface. Obviously, nobody would manage to paint the whole planet in reasonable time, so we are focusing also on procedural texturing and vegetation placement. The textures for terrain are generated on the fly, using terrain local information at pixel level, like elevation, slope and curvature, combining it with fractal data uniquely generated for the textured tile. In the near future we'll also support different climate & land types, matching terrain color of Blue Marble data, with seamless transition to fractal-mixed terrain materials. That would mean for an artificial planet that you will be able to paint a map with colors representing land types like a desert, forest, steppes etc and the program will generate the detailed terrain using this map to guide its autogen process.
Current version has only a limited support for this, nevertheless everything is generated automatically, there's no external info except for the rough 90m elevation data.

In addition to the guided automatic generation there is also the possibility to use vector data for things like roads or generally where you do want to artificially alter the generated world. Vector data operations can modify terrain elevation and/or the generated textures as well, or remove/add trees etc.

Model importer supports only DDS textures, we do not want to waste time with additional formats now when there's much work everywhere, and anything can be converted anyway.
No support any 3rd party middleware yet, it will come later.
No voxel support.

Day & Night cycle is in there already, although it's not quite finished yet with respect to model lighting and the night sky.
Also the water is currently only a simple quiet plane, but we won't need DX11 for a better one.
Currently there are seas only at altitude zero, but there will be lakes that can be placed at any altitude using the vector data, i.e. once we import lake polygon definitions the lakes will appear inland.

pico:
I dont know if u answered das Question allready because i dont anderstand all that English Stuff :(.
Do the Engine use Geometry clipmaps for smooth Terrainrendering Lods?  

Like this:  http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter02.html

cameni:
No, we are using a quadtree based adaptive LOD system.

pico:
Oh, sounds like Lodjumps and no smooth Terrainrendering. A great pity. I like the morphing Thing. Because the eyes allways record the Lodjumps.

Apart from these i really like ur Engine. Looks like a lot of neat solution, like Textureduplication and Stuff.

(sorry about my English...)

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