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[cameni]

Latest info about what we've been doing.

Lots of stuff has been done on the visuals - shadows are finally in, and even though they are not finished yet the output is much nicer with them. It uses a randomized lookup into the shadow map but the blurring pass is not present yet, so the closeups show noisy shadow edges. This will go away with the blurring pass on the shadow map.



The ugly patterns on the ground visible in older screen shots, resulting from tiled textures have been suppressed by more fractal magic - a free fractal channel has been used to mix three textures (daisies, grass and a lighter grass) together and the pattern is almost completely gone.



Another thing that helped a lot was the color transformation to linear space. This included both the input (loading the textures in sRGB format and also correctly computing the mipmaps) and setting the render target. The fix is most obvious on the atmosphere that now looks more natural.



The trees are also slightly randomly colorized to break the monotonicity.



The material system has progressed as well, as it can be seen on the new truck model here.





Also new is the support for dirty glass windows.



A gun is mounted on the roof, with a separate controller. It should be also functional soon, along with some flying prey to ground [smile]






The new model appearing in the shots is the Tatra T813 8x8 heavy all-terrain truck with unique independent swing half axles. I wrote specialized code to handle its physics, and it works quite nicely. It is much better visible in motion, a video will be coming soon.

[helio2]

Everything looks like its falling into place *Evil grin* muahahahahaha.....
Seriously though, that picture with the gun turret and  the mountain in the background behind the forest looks TOO awesome!
Also that all terrain truck with the independently swinging axles looks bad ass even if it is just a still picture , to be honest.

These almost looks like oblivion graphics, its just missing the grass blades on the ground. You guys planing on adding any overgrowth?

[cameni]

Yes we have already experimented with grass rendering but as usual we need to make a solution for the whole range of detail there. The same applies to shrubs and trees, and I'm hoping to use a similar mechanism for all three, but each used in different levels of detail.

[lionheart]

Hello Gentlemen.

This is some awesome sim engine work.

May I ask, can this be run on average computers with this new fractal control technology?  Can one, with an average computer, see all these trees and amazing mountains?  Does this programming technology enable computers to exponentially handle such immense tasks?


It looks awesome.  I am a flight simulator addon designer, and have wanted my own sim for ages, and this looks awesome.  Great to see you are using vehicles as well as planes.  In the FS world, we have all been thinking that it would not be long before the sim melded with ground vehicles and the two united.  Such a thing could enable online game play (simulated environments) both in the air and on the ground, various games, various environments.  One could drive to a an airport, walk to the plane, get in, fly to a new city, get out, go to a building, walk in, get a car rented, go to the parking lot, drive to a location on a great motorway, etc...  

The possibilities are endless...

To go one step further...   Planet to planet...    :0



Bill
LHC

[cameni]

Hi,

Well I don't know what is considered average these days. But as for the triangle counts - for terrain it's 250k on the level ground, 500k in mountains, falls to 100k few hundred meters above the terrain. Trees are generated through geometry shaders, if the forest was continuous it makes another 1.2 million, in practice it is less.

The videos were captured on 9800GT, 4 MSAA at 1280x720, the framerate capped at 30fps which it can hold. Moreover there is no occlusion yet and there are several things that are not optimal by far, especially the rendering of distant trees. Note also that the majority of processing goes on in GPU and the CPU has plenty of resources to handle the simulation etc.

The engine started as a ground level engine, so maybe that's why we always focused on the terrain detail appropriate for vehicles, but always also with enormous view distances. This combination now resulted in what you saw in the video, we can have both the ground vehicles with all the terrain detail, and the aerial ones too.

Planet to planet - in fact we could create Mars or Moon much easier than Earth, thanks to the missing vegetation and water bodies etc. We will surely create also these, or any planets for which there are some data to seed from. Putting this all together .. that would be something

[maxter]

The progression you guys are making is astonishing.  I have followed your information releases from the start and the progress is awesome.
With the vehicles, are you going to have evidence of the vehicles passing over ground such as tire tracks etc and what have you got planned for clouds?  Will they be truly volumetric?

Is there somewhere I can understand this "Fractal" technology?

[cameni]

Tracks are possible, but we need to implement specific support for localized terrain updates, the same one that will allow fast creation of craters.
The clouds will be volumetric, we are thinking about integrating SimulWeather or implementing our own solution.

Fractals cover quite wide area so finding relevant information isn't always easy. Artificial Terrain Generation section on vterrain.org might be helpful, although our method isn't there. I have yet to write something, if it only didn't take so much time.

[maxter]

Thanks for that, the time you have taken to answer my questions is very much appreciated.

cheers,

[corona]

I have yet to write something, if it only didn't take so much time.

Once cannot help but nottice that blog-posts are...well, far and between (or however the saying goes in english) these days, and if those are mostly screenshots.

In the past there were some wonderful technical posts, along with demonstrations of the engine using those various techniques.

So I guess my question is, did these stop because
a) not enough time
b) mostly bug-fixing/tuning engine at this point, so nothing new to show
c) don't want to give away secrets or
d) you hate us all and wish to deprive us of the joy of reading about it

Edit: whoooo, I'm a senior now. Hope I'll get a scenior citizen discount when the time comes :-)

[cameni]

I'd say that the posts were mostly technical back when I started posting on gamedev, but that was when I and Angrypig weren't in Outerra yet. Employed in company working on various enterprise applications. What a waste of time
But there was time for experimenting and writing about it for a more technically oriented community.

Now that there's much more work on getting all the components and details finished, the distance between cool technical posts increases, so b).
And when I see how much work there is still, then a).
And when I see how slowly it goes, somebody might get ahead of us, so c)

And of course d), as I generally hate people


But, speaking of technical stuff .. around the end of the year there might appear something about Outerra and related technologies here. But only if I manage to find some time for the preparation

[RaikoRaufoss]

I personally am feeling over the hill, as my ideas for this engine have already been posted, we're going into more technical things which I really don't know much about, and thus I can't really do anything other than stick around and praise the new videos and ideas I like.  So what can I say that's useful?

[cameni]

I personally am feeling over the hill, as my ideas for this engine have already been posted, we're going into more technical things which I really don't know much about, and thus I can't really do anything other than stick around and praise the new videos and ideas I like.  So what can I say that's useful?

It's perfectly OK just to stick around
Especially during these times when the demo isn't out yet.

[RaikoRaufoss]

It's perfectly OK just to stick around
Especially during these times when the demo isn't out yet.

Thanks.  I do what I can, even though in recent days I feel like I haven't been able to do much.  And I like the new ranks we now have.

[C. Shawn Smith]

Just stick around and look at all the pretty pictures .  I only know a few web-related languages (can't even wrap my head around C++, C# or the various other incarnations ... yet).  But I still check the site every day waiting for that next bit of news .  I personally have my own sights set on things this engine might be able to provide me, and it's frustratingly nail-biting for me to consider the possibilities ... The major project I was looking at originally is still a year away from getting close to the alpha stage for development, and knowing that Outerra is what I want but may still be two to three years away at best, is KILLING me hehe.  I have a few skills I can contribute, but they're still a long way from that being a possibility.  Until then, I look at the pretty pictures and video, ask my various questions, and hope that the Grand Canyon will soon not have so many pine trees in it

Cameni, one very quick question: Would it be possible to easily LOWER the water level in Outerra?  20 years ago, I was developing a story in which the sun went Red Giant before it was predicted to, and dried up all the oceans.  Most of civilization was left at the bottom of what used to be the Pacific Ocean.  Do you have data for the undersea environment as well?  (Also considering the possibility of submarines, etc .  That would also be an interesting world to explore

[cameni]

Water bodies will be done using several approaches. The basic one, for oceans - with a water plane at sea level (which can be changed). Regions that are below the sea level, or where the water surface is below (like the Dead Sea) have to be excluded from it though. These regions and the regions around lakes will be defined as polygons with a custom water level.

We have data for oceans and seas, with 1km resolution, but refined by fractal down to centimeters again. There could be some undersea climates with different vegetation and so.