Outerra Engine > News
Outerra Engine Progress
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 :)
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