Hey, Ric. Just wanted to say hi
I recognize you from the bohemia forums (I go by a different name there), and it sounds like we both found outerra out of a similar motivation
I have heard that they are planning on moving to pure 64-bit with outerra (correct me if I am wrong) in the future. 3d trees are supposed to be on the way, and other encouraging goodies. My impression as a new, and semi-casual observer at this point is that, while the wait may be long, things sound promising over here. From my initial observations of cpu and gpu utilization in Anteworld (purchased version) it does still seem to use 1 core very heavily, and the rest of the cores/threads almost not at all (about 5-15%). But, I think what we have currently is primarily a GPU based rendering engine at this point. But, that is uninformed speculation from me.
As far as GPU usage, it seems to behave much more predictably and appropriately than A3 (meaning, it doesn't use full GPU b/c it doesn't need to at times, but it doesn't tank my fps along with it, and it isn't acting like my GPU usage is being crapped upon by CPU factors, etc).
That said, being able to go from space to grass waving in the wind in a matter of a few seconds while maintaining good framerate is quite encouraging.
Though, transitioning from different elevations or into different areas of the world sometimes requires loading which can be very slow (KBs/sec, making it take 30 seconds to buffer 5MB of data). I'm not sure why that is, or if it is a problem on my end, or just the nature of this engine being very much in a pre-release state. But, I am, so far, encouraged, and this is one of the engines that I have been keeping an eye on in hopes of some future forward progress that will offer potential for worthy alternatives to Arma 3, and DCS, for example, at some point down the line.
