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[StoneX]

Hi,

at first I would like to say that I watched your youtube clips and the pictures here in this forum and I´m stunned! Great engine with high potential!

I would like to now what´s next? What are you planning to do?

Implementing roads worldwide, more treediversity, more terrain types, weather, clouds ??

And what is roughly the schedule for those things? Does it take one, two, three, six or ten years until it´s possible to create a game with outerra?

Best regards

Kai

[cameni]

Well we are working towards making the engine usable for other developers that would want to license it. This includes heaps of missing functionality, including all things you mention.
We are also considering making a game ourselves on it first.

In any case a development of a game will start in 2011, and the duration depends on its complexity. With our game we could follow the popular indie model of releasing an alpha version of the game for a reduced price so that eager supporters could get their hands on it early while also supporting (and also partially steering) the development.

[StoneX]

Suggestion from my side for your game. Let the potential gamers develop things themselve.
Imagine you would plan to make a flight sim. Let the customers (the gamer, not the one who would like to license your engine) make the content.

In Microsofts Flight Simulator, regardless of the version, many people buy it and don´t use the original content. Instead of that, they buy Ultimate Terrain for Autogen Landclasses, Roads, Ground Textures, Clouds, weather generators, add on planes, height meshes and so on.

[cameni]

Suggestion from my side for your game. Let the potential gamers develop things themselve.
Imagine you would plan to make a flight sim. Let the customers (the gamer, not the one who would like to license your engine) make the content.

In Microsofts Flight Simulator, regardless of the version, many people buy it and don´t use the original content. Instead of that, they buy Ultimate Terrain for Autogen Landclasses, Roads, Ground Textures, Clouds, weather generators, add on planes, height meshes and so on.

IMO, the two paragraphs don't talk about the same thing. The first one says that people like to mod the world, so they would be content with a sandbox environment, creating the world themselves. That's fine, there are many like that and we are leaning that way too.

The second one says there's a market for high quality content providers because people will buy precisely modeled areas of the world. That's fine too.
Most probably these are two different groups of people. The second ones buy stuff from capable ones from the first group

[ZeosPantera]

Any game Cameni and Pig throw together as a "demo" of outerra and it features will far surpass anything the people licensing the engine will come up with. I can almost guarantee it since only cameni knows all the limitations and capabilities of OT and all the selling points of space, ground, air and sea travel he would want to show off probably wont interest a purpose driven game developer.

So whats next?  Threatening letters to ATi I imagine.

[Diesel Smoke]

Does this engine allow airfoils?

[flightmaster]

Does this engine allow airfoils?

it uses JSBsim as the flight dynamics model, but nothing that actually simulates air moving over a wing (X Plane does though)

[Kridian]

So whats next?  Threatening letters to ATi I imagine.

Aye!

[Diesel Smoke]

Does this engine allow airfoils?

it uses JSBsim as the flight dynamics model, but nothing that actually simulates air moving over a wing (X Plane does though)

So does Rigs of Rods. I am from their forum.

[phlerp]

IMO, the two paragraphs don't talk about the same thing. The first one says that people like to mod the world, so they would be content with a sandbox environment, creating the world themselves. That's fine, there are many like that and we are leaning that way too.

The second one says there's a market for high quality content providers because people will buy precisely modeled areas of the world. That's fine too.
Most probably these are two different groups of people. The second ones buy stuff from capable ones from the first group

I'd say the two aren't necessarily opposites. Many of the people that do small mods also uses many professionally made mods and add ons. In fact, a big part of the commercial add ons started out as small hobby projects.

As I see it the main reasons there are so many commercial add ons are first the high degree of freedom where you can do almost anything you can imagine, and second the simplicity where it is so easy to get started.

My point is that I don't think there is a clear border between the two groups.

Edit: fixed some  iPhone induced crappy spelling

[StoneX]

What I wanted to say with that 2 paragraphs is that you don´t need an earth with incredible details and plenty of planes to fly with cause the users will replace the original sim textures, meshes, landclasses with add ons anyway.

[cameni]

I know you wanted to say that, I just noticed that the two paragraphs don't exactly line up

Anyway, here it's not that easy to replace everything by parts. Everything is tied together more tightly than in FS, but that's also why it feels more consistent as a whole world. There aren't meshes but specially compressed elevation data, textures are generated from natural distribution models, topology and from vector data overlays, landclasses are divided to a global natural distribution and a civilization vector data layer etc. It can be modified, but it all will be different and it will be a while until all the necessary tools mature enough.

[OGREMAN]

I think Angy Pig & Cameni... that hurts,
that there is going to be quite an increase in comments and opinion from people who think this engine works (broadly) in the same way as all the other terrain based stuff out there. Proceedural creation of terrain using mandlebrot arithmetic is so different from the "standard" that  most of us (includes me) dont have a clue about the principles at its core. It is a good sign of the growing awareness of this engine but maybe not a helpful development.
How about producing a "trolls guide" section in the forum that explains the basic principles behind the engine (FAQ's etc), it might head off at the pass some of those less well informed questions from the likes of me and save you some time in the longer run. Yours "still blown away" Green Bloke.

[cameni]

Yea, that's a good idea. I should probably make a blog about that along with some neat graphics.