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[FeedMeCheese]

Hi! I'm rather new to the forums and the Outerra engine in general, but I'd just like to start off by saying that this is BY FAR the most breathtaking and plain amazing tech demo I have ever experienced. I've been playing around with it for almost all day now and I have a little list of suggestions.


Seamlessness

I was astonished by the fact that you can zoom from a ground level position to an inter-planetary view of the earth in a matter of seconds and that was one of the most amazing things I've seen in an engine by far. I realise that the engine uses real elevation data that needs to be downloaded from a server (and that is amazing), but the trouble is, when you have to download megabytes of data at 150-200 Kbps it can take minutes for an area of land to generate and "pop in" to the world and that really takes away from the seamlessness of floating from space down to ground level. It also prevents the game from being played offline.

I have read that you plan to add an algorithmic generation option in the future, much like this:
Having an algorithmic option for generating the earth would make the game more seamless as no downloading would need to occur and entering the planets' atmosphere would be as seamless as shown in the video I posted. I think that would be fantastic as at the moment it can become a little boring waiting for the elevation data to download and then "pop-in" which saps the seamlessness almost completely.


Vehicles

I know that there are plans for adding more vehicles and functionality in the future! Some that I would suggest would be:

     Faster, smaller land-based vehicles such as sports cars or a dune buggy for navigating
     
     A smaller quad bike or motorcycle for getting around places where there are a lot of trees

     Weaponised vehicles such as missiles for the helicopter, fighter jets or maybe land vehicles with mounted turrets

     Possibly some sort of spacecraft as shown in the video I linked that would allow you to transverse large sections of planets quickly


Tools

I thought it could be good to have an option to add fences or barriers along some segments of road, much like highways or cliffside roads have.


Buildings

Would it be possible to have enter-able buildings? It's great to build up a little city but all you can really do at the moment is look at them. Could there possibly be some sort of building system where one could add rooms, doors and windows to a house or maybe the spawnable buildings could have procedurally generated interiors?


Lights and Day/Night Cycle

It would be great to have a day/night cycle and to be able to place street/road lights alongside segments of road to light them up in the night. It would also look great from above when looking down on a city at night.


Finally, Ideas for Outerra use in a game

I personally think that Outerra/Anteworld should stay as a sandbox game. I seriously believe that turning it into a flight sim/driving game will restrict the engine dramatically. I believe that it should stay a world sandbox game or at least keep the main focus on a sandbox game. At the moment, it is looking as if it will turn out to be a real-life Minecraft style game with SO many more features. And I'm sure a LOT of people will love that!

[cameni]

Hi John and thanks for your kind words.

Yes there is a possibility for the planet to be generated algorithmically, it could work even now. The problem is that our procedural algorithms were tuned for refinement of real elevation data, and when applied globally they would make a dull world. Most of pure fractal engines that use various incarnations of ridged fractals create unrealistic worlds that look alike at all scales. That's what we would like to avoid. We will have procedural worlds, but plan to use specialized algorithms for different stages of planet creation.

But we would like to focus more on the artistic creation of the worlds, where you could predefine shapes of continents, rivers, mountain ridges etc, and have the world generated from that.

Btw the problem with download is largely affected by our slow servers, but you can also download the whole dataset here.

[FeedMeCheese]

Wow! Thanks for the extremely speedy response!

So you do plan to have an algorithmic (no downloading required) generation option, but it will be more complex than others and therefore have different stages of planet creation? That sounds even better than what I suggested! I think that would be really beneficial, download wise (as some people have capped bandwidth limits ect) and gameplay wise as generation will be totally seamless! The predefining options sound even better too, oh the fun that shall be had with that!

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck with the engine and can't wait to see what new features you add to Anteworld! Keep up the fantastic work!