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[Dunlop]

Hi

First of all, your work is amazing. I just couldnt believe things like this would be possible to do on a GPU, all those fractal calculations and such. Nice to know I was wrong!

I read that you have plans for making other planets like Moon & Mars. Will the engine be able to zoom from planet to planet? Can it display more than one planet on screen? If it can, then  my idea is to make a spaceflight simulator with this engine. There are many possibilities here. It could be a space combat game, with realistic (newtonian) physics or with "StarWars" physics. Or an uber realistic Apollo simulator. It could be alot of work, if its even possible, but the results would be unique surely.

You could check out a freeware space flight simulator named Orbiter. It is an extremely realistic simulation of various real spacecraft and very hard to master, but something on that scale would be impressive with this engine. They have a non graphics beta version on development that could use a planetary graphics engine like this. http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

Or if the game is about combat, then Im thinking something in the style of the good old Elite, in that game you could also land on a planet. Why not combine both space and air combat in one game? The possibilities are endless...

[cameni]

Thanks!
Yes it will be possible to render multiple planets, so a spaceflight simulator can be done as well. Planets viewed from distance are effective to render. Heavier processing is only required near the planet surface, when other planets are distant and their rendering already cheap.

A game combining space and air combat could be nice too, although I feel that balancing that would not be easy. We didn't fully conceive the scale of our planet until we were able to explore it in the engine, with all the detail available that really changes the perception of space. Making a game where you don't get lost that easily can be a problem
I mean, designing a game like Elite would be surely different here in this context. But I agree that it could be an interesting game too

[helio2]

What kind of Physics engine are you using for the game? or is it a a custom one? Also how well can it handle space and air Flight?

[cameni]

JSBSim for planes and Bullet for ground. Some problems with Bullet when handling planetary terrain, we'll see soon how it can be hacked.

[Vora]

Just a spontaneous brain fart...
There is a quite successful space MMO called EVE-Online by CCP who's stated goal for the future is to enable "walking on planets" (right now they are developing a 3D engine for "walking in stations" to be released late this year).
Maybe they are interested in licensing this engine for their planetary thing.

[angrypig]

Just a spontaneous brain fart...
There is a quite successful space MMO called EVE-Online by CCP who's stated goal for the future is to enable "walking on planets" (right now they are developing a 3D engine for "walking in stations" to be released late this year).
Maybe they are interested in licensing this engine for their planetary thing.

Thank you for your trust. Our engine is still in development but I am sure that when developer of EVE-Online will see it suitable for their purposes they will get in touch.

[Ray]

Hi Everyone

I am the admin on SpaceSimCentral.com and a few of the members are taking a liking to the Outerra engine. Great job the screenshots and the videos look great. I hope someone has some plans to create a space game with this engine because the surface to space and space to surface transitions would look great as you ascend/descend the atmosphere.

Hope to see more games created by this engine. Any hopes for a development kit for Outerra for the people that are not to programming savy (like a UDK)? I would be great just to make some planets and small movies with this engine.

Keep up the hard work.

[cameni]

Hi Ray,

Thanks for joining us.
With the engine we focus mainly on the Earth and then on the other planets in our solar system for which there are data. Later we'd like to work also on the algorithms for generating artificial planets, but it's not a priority now.

Our ultimate goal is not just a development kit. As I've said elsewhere already, we'd like to create a platform for space and whole-planet games, ultimately. The idea is to have several realms that contain the planet definitions, for example for Earth a prehistoric realm, a modern and a futuristic and an apocalyptic one and so on. The developers would provide their specific game code and assets, deriving from a preexisting realm and thus reusing the amount of work needed to create a living planet.

Then for example the flight simulator guys can all build and enhance the contemporary realm, in a kind of wiki-style shared edits, but in fact it should bring them the possibility to focus more on their specific simulator stuff, rather than having to deal with the rendering every time.

While we want to create our own games with the engine as well, our ultimate goal is the platform. We are terrain rendering guys, and while we don't make 6 planet engines in 4 years , we want to make this one right so that others can implement their game ideas more easily.

But of course all this depends on many factors and it's still just a distant prospect.