Outerra forum
Outerra Engine => Technology => Topic started by: Anarkist on April 11, 2015, 09:30:50 am
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hey Cameni,
I am still interested in employing Outerra in a game project which I discussed with you a couple of years ago, but not in the immediate term. For now I am focused on developing in Unity, because of how comprehensive the toolset is that you have at your disposal and the thriving community which makes a tremendous amount of assets and extension available to other developers.
In saying that I would like to employ Outerra once I am in a position to expand the scope of my project and exploit the scale offered by Outerra. Would you at some point offer a license that permits developers greater exposure and access to the engine code, perhaps even source code? One extension to the engine I am interested in would be the integration of specialized rendering engine into the rendering system within Outerra. Would that be possible at all or is the planetary generation completely intertwined with the rendering engine? This is the particular rendering engine I propose to eventually have integrated into Outerra.
http://www.siliconstudio.co.jp/middleware/mizuchi/en/#6thpage
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The engine was specifically made for procedural world generation and planetary scale range, and as such you can't really separate the generator and the engine and put the generator into a generic 3D engine (with the same performance).
Moreover I don't think any engine can just simply replace its rendering part, like Mizuchi tries to indicate with those fancy blocks. OT renderer is physically based as well, but it's limited by the amount of data needed for the whole world rendering and it has to do some compromises. Even if it was possible to simply replace the material renderer, the result won't be the same as shown there, with current hardware generation.
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hello Cameni,
Thanks to continually engaging with your community here.
Well its not a huge priority for me at any case, because like I said I am currently developing I Unity 5, but thought to ask for future reference.
What I would like to know is how likely it would be that Voxel Farm could be integrated into the Outerra content creation pipeline. I have it in mind to use it to create structural assets like building, both exteriors and interiors. This is why I would have liked to integrate Mizuchi into the rendering system, because it would add stunning visual effects to the interiors which are viewable up close, so its important to ensure the graphical fidelity of the materials in the scene.
http://docs.voxelfarm.com/get-voxel-farm
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The problem is that combining engines is never easy. Both utilize system resources all the way they can, so you'd have to do some heavy compromises to get them to work together. And that's not even talking about architectural differences. It's far more probable that OT will get a custom integrated voxel support than that it will be combined with another engine.
Regarding the Voxel Farm, I tested it a while already, but I must say that I'm a bit disappointed by the LOD switching and how quickly the detail deteriorates with distance. Probably it can be adjusted to behave better on a better hardware, but it means that even trying to match OT and VoxelFarm-like system detail metrics will likely be quite problematic.
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I just found this other voxel based engine and it did demystified for me what a voxeled mesh could look like up close and at different LOD.
youtu.be/YSM82Qs8e-E
and the live alteration on these things, even on vehicles, are really interesting.
youtu.be/J62z_7JaYMw
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Got me thinking ... how do they apply textures on that voxel stuff ? Or its just filling up the volume of a model and slap its UV on it ?
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hey Cameni,
I've got pretty good hardware, so its not a problem for me. Do you have the code you used to integrate Voxel Farm with Outerra? Would you be willing to share it with me if you do? It will make it worth me upgrading to the Indie License of Voxel Farm if can get get it. Just to experiment and test before I commit to working on the game project in Outerra
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I didn't integrate it, that would be insane thing to attempt as I just described above, even if I had the VF sources. I just tested the VoxelFarm itself.
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I didn't integrate it, that would be insane thing to attempt as I just described above, even if I had the VF sources. I just tested the VoxelFarm itself.
I'd just assumed you may have created a plugin to similar what you would make for 3d Studio Max etc to export objects from Voxel Farm. My bad.
We'll see how Outerra and Voxel Farm develop over time. For now I'll stick to Unity3d. Thanks