First of all hello! I'm new here.
I bought the engine a year ago after I saw a post on Reddit, and let me just by saying it's truly a work of art. I know it's far from finished and we're still just seeing the early stages of development, but I think it's going to be spectacular once you guys implement clouds, proper trees and a few other basic elements.
The main reason I registered here is that I couldn't find an answer to a question that has been bugging me lately experimenting with the engine; how are buildings supposed to be added? I realize there probably isn't
one answer to this question, however I would love to hear what you have been pondering so far. Traditional modeling can be very time consuming and takes years to master and to make even the most basic city by hand [CAD] can easily take a months of hard work, let alone making enough cities to populate a planet at the scale of the earth. This could of course be aided by "crowd" modeling (people working together) but frankly the tools aren't there yet and my guess is the result would be uncoordinated and messy. They would also be forced to work toward the same vision. So, in keeping with the spirit of the engine, is there a procedural solution to making builings, cities and other man-made objects? I have seen a couple of videos of people choosing this route and I came away less than impressed, take this for instance:
There are a few other examples out there, but they all have that sterile, generic look to them.
I also had the idea of importing buildings from Google Maps as illustrated here:
http://www.google.com/earth/learn/3dbuildings.html but quickly found that the models (surprise!) were lacked proper detail. I have yet to try out this route in Outerra, but I have done it in Unity with mixed results using models that others made before. Note that this is quite time consuming and doesn't really fit this application. The third and last suggestion/question concerns Google's Project Tango, which in short is (please correct me if I'm wrong) a way to use optics and other sensors to map your surroundings, for instance a building. This has been done before using expensive professional equipment, but they seek to get the technology in the hands of ordinary consumers by early next year. Presented here:
.
What do you, the Outerra dev. team and modders think? What's
your vision for Outerra regarding buildings? Will we some day be able to import and to freely roam around an exact replica of our home town/village?
Let me end with a quick random question: is there a way (simple way) to change the time of day? I seem to always end up somewhere where there's night.