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[cameni]

1. What is Outerra?
Outerra is the name of our company; we are a small indie developer, currently focusing on the development of game engine known as Outerra engine

2. What is Outerra Engine?
Outerra Engine is a global world rendering engine capable of seamless real time rendering of planets from space down to centimeter details on the surface. It can use arbitrary resolution of elevation data, refining it further to the finest resolution using fractal algorithms and procedural techniques. See full feature list here.

3. What is procedural generation, and how does the engine differ from other games/engines?
Procedural generation is a concept of generating data algorithmically, rather than manually, in order to reduce amount of manual modeling or to generate detail when there are no data at given level  of detail. Procedural generation can involve various fractal or algorithmic techniques; in OE it is used to refine terrain, generate the trees or for water rendering and more.

The engine differs mainly in that in OE the whole world will be ready from the beginning and you start with modding it, whereas with common engines you usually start with an empty, constrained level.

4. Multiplatform support
Currently the engine runs on Windows, but it uses only the portable libraries such as OpenGL. Support for Mac/Linux platforms will be coming in future, it shouldn't be problematic as long as there are working drivers for OpenGL 3.3.

5. How to get updates on the status of Outerra?
You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter:
   
   

There is also an Outerra Blog that gets updated with news and more technical posts.
The forums are the best way to follow the progress if you want to get a more in-depth explanation and/or to participate in a discussion with us.


Note: members can post replies to this topic, these will be later deleted and answered or used to refine the existing answers if deemed worthy.

[FoxMag]

Still working under Windows only?

[cameni]

Yep. At the moment we have too few resources to expand the support, and given that Macs don't support OpenGL 3.3 yet ..

[Webbstre]

How far is the engine intended to go as far as living things? Once all the terrain stuff is taken care of I'd love to see things like ecosystems and people and all sorts of things to interact with. Kind of like the original intentions behind Spore's development.

[cameni]

How far is the engine intended to go as far as living things? Once all the terrain stuff is taken care of I'd love to see things like ecosystems and people and all sorts of things to interact with. Kind of like the original intentions behind Spore's development.

That's probably more game-specific, but of course needs some support form the engine. Once the terrain and biomes are right, we'll surely think about it.

[Webbstre]

How far is the engine intended to go as far as living things? Once all the terrain stuff is taken care of I'd love to see things like ecosystems and people and all sorts of things to interact with. Kind of like the original intentions behind Spore's development.

That's probably more game-specific, but of course needs some support form the engine. Once the terrain and biomes are right, we'll surely think about it.

Woohoo! I'll still be around when that time comes

[Ice Cold Killa]

How come you guys don't use DirectX? I heard it's better than OpenGL

[cameni]

The only thing better with DirectX was the driver support, but OpenGL is finally getting better here. But it was bad back then, to the point that we contemplated porting it over to DirectX. The engine was initially built with possibility to use a DirectX back end, but as the situation got better we abandoned the idea, as it would be costly.

OpenGL gives us the possibility to create a portable app running on Mac and Linux machines as well. This is more important for use of OT in other, non-game environments, but also with the rise of tablets and non-Microsoft operating systems in the future.

[Bluetwoo]

Will there be MMO support (client/server) in Outerra engine?

[cameni]

Not any kind of universal MMO support (or not anytime soon). That's something developers would want to implement using other libraries that are specialized on massive networking and suitable for their particular game design.

[hintOn]

Hello, I know somebody already asked, but is the engine still only supports Windows? I mean, it's using OpenGL so it shouldn't be very hard to make it work under other OS

[cameni]

Still Windows only, it shouldn't be a big problem to port to Linux (AFAIK Macs don't have OpenGL 3.3 yet), but we need to allocate resources for that anyway.

[mrsquish]

I have a feeling this question has been asked already but I didn't quite understand the answer.

Will there be the ability to run user hosted servers? It would be awesome to go traveling with a few mates, and or develop a small coop game on top of Outerra.

[cameni]

Yes, once there's a multiplayer you will be able to set up your own servers. Specifically aiming at minigames taking place in the living world.

[ZeosPantera]

The real question is will there be master servers that know all the addresses of all the user servers (presumably OT will track servers regardless) and locations and can sync them? It would probably take 100's of miles to fly/drive between server hot-spots. Protected servers appear as restricted zones and the transition across open servers would be transparent.