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Author Topic: Status of the engine?  (Read 10478 times)

theshanergy

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Status of the engine?
« on: November 28, 2018, 02:27:33 pm »

Hey guys just checking in again after a few year hiatus - from a quick read over the forums it looks like the engine isn't yet commercially available. Is there any update on the status of the engine? I'm early into development of an outdoors sports game in unity and trying to replicate the general look and feel of the terrain, textures, grass and foliage in Outerra (or, the world for that matter). Just not getting the results I want and I keep looking at Outerra with longing eyes. Is there any chance the engine will reach a usable state for indie game development in the near term future? I would absolutely love to build my game in Outerra, even if it meant waiting a year for launch. Failing that, if anyone has any tips for super thick performant grass and natural looking terrain textures in unity let me know!  =D
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cameni

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2018, 02:18:44 am »

Yeah it's still not generally available, only to selected special projects on which we usually have to participate directly, with all the support and development costs it includes. It's a gargantuan project, and the world construction and all the global imports and everything around it takes most of our time, while the game side of engine functionality is still far from being usable to developers who can't afford direct support. Right now our licensees have to invest a lot of resources into development of features that people often take for granted in other popular engines, and of course the scale makes everything much harder.

Releasing our own game on the engine (and not just a tech demo) is the necessary first step, though for general usability one would also need documenting all the stuff and having a support team, not just a lot of internal knowledge. Also it requires our top priority to be licensing the engine, but we personally would more like working on games and sims, while the engine we built is just the means to achieve it. Therefore it's more likely that there will first arise an ability to make games on a sim platform we release, aimed at mod makers initially, which would also address the problems of scale and the data required ...

Another way is to make a terrain exporter so that folks can take the terrains into Unity, though that's a separate set of problems in itself, and I have no idea how Unity will handle that (switching from procedural to streaming?).
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chomper

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #2 on: December 13, 2018, 06:10:03 pm »

Slightly related question, is there a list of projects that use the Outerra tech?
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cameni

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #3 on: December 14, 2018, 04:25:07 am »

We can't talk about Titan projects unless they or their customers publish the info, which doesn't happen so often. But it can be found in many special simulators already, with several larger ones coming.
Apart from Titan there is just a few of smaller simulators or prototypes.

There are no commercial or game projects using it yet, mainly because of what I wrote above ...
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2eyed

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #4 on: December 14, 2018, 03:13:05 pm »

Is a Steam release still in the plans?
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cameni

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #5 on: December 17, 2018, 04:03:54 am »

Yes. Our plans are ... long term :)
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2eyed

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #6 on: December 17, 2018, 11:13:54 am »

Yes. Our plans are ... long term :)
I almost thought so =D
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chomper

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Re: Status of the engine?
« Reply #7 on: January 21, 2019, 07:45:35 pm »

Any updates on when the new platform will go live?
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