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[thor99]

Hi im philip, im one of the admins of a game know as the "world of gotha", its a geofiction game with creative commons licensing (non profit) that me, fellow admin and player have been crafting for over a year. we have created our world to be as high resolution as possible but it would be cool if we could integrate it into an engine such as outerra.

I dont know if the outerra community might allow us to create a "gotha mod" for outerra for the purpose of exploring the planet and improving conworlding accordingly, but would be awesome if we could. 

its great to have found such and awesome program, and HI overall. 

[thor99]

Well my idea was to use Outerra as a means of exploring our world as you would in Google earth but at far higher resolution and realism. i have 3d modelling and texturing experience so i planned to construct custom models for trees and son on (for example use the road mechanism but with a custom model to draw nations borders or rivers)

[PytonPago]

Wow ... just took a look at your wiki. Got some thought there, it really seems as an interesting world. OT will have an artificial world creator later on, doe, if it would be done by some experienced geo-geek in a form now importable for OT just like the ME-DEM Project ...

http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=1491.msg17121#msg17121

... then if some people of yours will do some modelling work just for the fun of it - might end up as an nice little mod.

[thor99]

Well we have a rather detailed terrain data set (a few km or less per pixel depending) that we constantly use to create maps, my idea was to refine that even further and resolve some abstracts that ive found, but what i gather is that different engines wrap terrain around the globe differently. if i could see how the data sets are arranged and broken down i could convert all our heighfield data into a projection suitable for Outerra (our projection is currently rectangular but im guessing outerra uses a Quadrilateralized spherical cube projection?)

I have experience creating planetary maps with multiple levels of detailed (Celestia) but that was equirectangular and accepted images as a bump or normals, im not sure that is the format outerra uses to store the data. Since our data set would be as large as earths i can host it.

Would be cool to embed an outerra viewer so contributors can navigate the planet.

[thor99]

Well yes i would personally be doing ALL the modelling, the other admin has a different orientation, other contributors are graphics orientated too but most are just creative.

[PytonPago]

hmm ... they had two other post sessions there, i thing there is some detail on the terrain data ..

http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=843.msg9719#msg9719

http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=326.0

Any else or more detailed things will be Cameni able to tell. Also contacting the DE-DEM team for their experience and way of terrain creating methods would be very useful as they did that work for an imaginary planet already. Otherwise, dds. format textures are supported for the model importer, for FBX all types are supported, as it converts them itself. ....

http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=2179.msg23655#msg23655

http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=1253.msg23831#msg23831

Info is a it scattered all over, but going trough the forums will prove useful as some details are explained here and there.

[cameni]

Hi Philip,
OT uses a variant of quadrilateralized spherical cube projection internally, but it processes external datasets in common rectangular geographic projection, divided into tiles. It creates all levels of detail and takes care of everything from that. The problem is usually how one can prepare the source data for it.
While the 1km resolution can be used, you'll soon notice that the results don't look nearly as good in real view, as they look on a 2D or relief map, and considerably more detail is needed. At least 100m would be good, but possibly coarser is still usable.
Biome data (colors and vegetation density) are currently in 500m resolution.

Usually the problem is that there are but a few tools that can work with large datasets, and it takes them ages to process it, and the results of various erosion algorithms don't look good anyway. What ME-DEM folks did in the end was that they took real-world mountains and synthesized the mountains in M-E world from that. FYI, their complete workflow takes approximately one week, and that's just processing relatively small patch of terrain, just as large as the Europe ...

Once you have these data prepared, processing in Outerra is fast - less than hour to process whole Earth in 90m resolution (raw ~200GB), the tool does the reprojection + wavelet compression and generates dataset suitable for the engine.

[thor99]

Well it took us about 3 months to generate our terrain to its current state, i could do further refinement with world machine. if its a case of generating more detail and subdividing it into its different levels i can do that (with patience).

I assume not to bother increasing detail on textures as its mostly procedural right (biomes)? and i assume rivers are still not available?

Fantastic to know it can process rectangular data subdivided further into levels, thats makes it miles easier!!!

I was a regular at the cartographers guild so i remember redrobes from there might pop by and ask.

Also about licensing, we are non profit but i assume there is a cost to use outerra for our world on our site?

[cameni]

Basically as long as it's going to be a non-profit mod for Anteworld - a new planet just as the M-E was - then there's no extra cost for the users. It will work even in the demo mode, but people who want to see objects (and maybe later some advanced functionality) will need to get the game as the tech demo is limited.
The dataset can be large, it's ~15GB for Earth, but people do not have to download it at once. If you can serve it from a web server, the game can download only the needed pieces.

The elevation data can be in a raw format (usually 16bit integer, or floats), or HFZ files. Currently the tiles need to overlap with the edges - the last column and row is shared with neighbor tile, but in future also a non-overlapped tiling will be supported.
Biome data are in RGBA format, with alpha used for vegetation density. The exact interpretation of the latter is subject to change, but basically it's a value that says how much % of surface is covered with vegetation, with some threshold reserved for trees.

Textures are generated procedurally from a set of base textures and the biome data, but lots of it will change in the future so there's no need to bother with it too much now. Rivers will be imported in vector format, not yet supported though.

[thor99]

Cool interesting, seems doable with my not so vast skill level, shame there is no way i can contribute to the program itself.

Is it possible to decrease the glare and fogginess of the upper atmosphere to allow better views of the surface from space?

[thor99]

Well i suppose i can contribute by making 3d models and textures.

[cameni]

You can adjust atmospheric parameters in the environment settings.

[thor99]

Well thank you all for your help, im going to re orient myself with with the workings of outerra as best as i can. i mean from what i learned about atmospheres in celestia it might come in handy.

[PytonPago]

Well i suppose i can contribute by making 3d models and textures.

Seeing another imaginary world on OT engine will be nice enough to see (and putting some models by various people will come eventually too) in addition to the ME-guys effort.  ... and yes - welcome to the OT fanclub ! Nice to see the place grow and new interesting ideas flowing. Best of luck to your project.