Zeos it was pretty easy getting it into Outerra but we did have some discussions with Cameni about some preliminary things which helped.
I'm sure other people will find it just as straightforward because the devs have implemented things to make this possible in the futrure for others too.
In the very distant future, it would be possible to incorporate the Middle Earth into Earth data, as a replacement for western Europe. It'd need a procedural blending at the borders but we can do that. It'd be interesting to see how it looked without the blending too, but the coastlines would really have to match where they met. Not everybody knows it, but Middle Earth was intended to be Earth but in a different time, so it's a natural thing to incorporate it like that.
If it was all surrounded by sea, that wouldn't be so bad either as an interactive or game experience. The place is utterly massive. I tried crossing the some of the map
(the crater) along the ground- I think that's a truck speed right?, and it took a long time- maybe around 15-20 minutes. That's like 1/6 the distance of the Mordor extents in that direction. Then you have the rest of the map which is maybe 6 times that again. These are
not accurate figures but you get the idea.
I think if, in a game for example, if you limited the altitude people could fly to, that wouldn't be so bad either- it would fit the mechanics of a fantasy game anyway. You could still problaby allow flight to at least 50K feet. The views would still be pretty amazing.
CShawn, it's something of a secret...
...well not really. I think it demands a few apps though. I find Global Mapper very useful for downloading large data sets as tiles from the SRTM. Easily exportable too. You could probably find a free replacement for that if you didn't want to buy it. You could probably get away with having a GIS capable viewer at all- maybe use Wilbur even.
I use Photoshop and I use the warp tool to bend terrain in 16 bit png the format. That tends to remove high freq detail though so you'll need to put that back in because the terrain looks noticeably poorer in Outerra without it. Maybe you can use Gimp, but I'm not sure about it's warp functionality.
You need a terrain modelling app capable of tiling output- World Machine or possibly L3DT.
You also need a paint prog for terrain painting because you end up butchering certain parts of the dem in Photoshop and I would not recommend fixing it in there in greyscales- I use Leveller for that- though you could probably get by with Wilbur.
I might also use GeoControl at some point for finding river flow.
That sounds like a lot and a bit compilcated and perhaps it is- I've just been doing this kind of toing and froing between apps for a long time now-I don't even think about it really. No one app really has all the features I need unfortunately.
Procedural modellers are close now though- for example, all World Machine needs is the spline tools developing a little bit more, or Howard Zhou to bring back his plugin, or maybe tesselation tool and the use of r-w terrain could be avoided imo.
It's just that Outerra allows you a God's eye view that players never get to have of a fantasy terrain- flight sims yes, but then they always use Earth data out of the box.
monks
