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[ZeosPantera]

What you don't want to do is release a tech demo that crashes every few minutes and has a terrible unfinished or refined UI and still has buggy drivers for half the video cards on the planet.

You only get to release a tech demo once and make an impression. Better make it a good one.

[knackered]

well from the blog alone this "engine" has been in active development for more than 3 years, but i know for sure it's been floating around for longer than that, in what seems like an infinite loop of refactoring. Again, from the blog the procedural displacement was in place on blog day 1 (july 2008), and a couple of months later the collision was in place. The progressive torrent downloading went in over 2 years ago....since then what....err...angrypig's tweaked his tree generator a bit more while cameni's rewritten the apparently incompetent data processing work of his unnamed 3rd colleague. He's rewritten his atmospheric scattering algorithm a few dozen more times, which I believe he's still not satisfied with.....oh yes and the last blog entry was some monumental procrastination about fog not appearing white...........still no demo of any kind, just grainy videos generated by his own plugin (which makes me very suspicious....his frame rate could well be in single figures but he steps the clock on 16ms per capture....we have no way of knowing).
when I first started following the blog it all looked impressive, the only question for me was "how good and how consistent is the framerate?" because that's the only thing that's difficult to get right. Still no demo, so 3 years later i still don't know. As the other guy said - it's been surpassed by other projects and it's lost much of its gloss now.
Mind you, if you do release a demo next year or whenever and it is genuinely impressive then I'll be glad to eat my words.

[SpaceFlight]

As the other guy said - it's been surpassed by other projects and it's lost much of its gloss now.

I dont think there are many planetary rendering engines out there right now (that I know of).
Maybe you can elaborate on which other projects you mean?

It seems the only ones in a somewhat advanced state are: "I-Novae Engine" (Infinity), an engine from Eric Bruneton,
"Space Engine" and "Outerra".

[ZeosPantera]

Lost much of it's gloss? Nobody knows about this engine. There are like 20 people active here on the forums watching in awe of all the accomplishments completed by only two individuals who had no intention of releasing this as a gaming platform before a year ago.

Patience is rewarded usually. Three years to get to this point is incredible and the fact they are even going to try to fully finish this to a gaming level is amazing.

Sh|t's still broken. Let them fix it.

[knackered]

game engine?!! are you kidding? this is just a terrain renderer! you obviously have no idea what's involved in developing a game engine.

[C. Shawn Smith]

[Cole Walker]

WOW!! I'm amazed at how people can be so ungrateful and from what I remember, this was just a side project up until a year ago I think.

Also I'm not sure if he missed this thread   Tech demo - Getting Closer

[ZeosPantera]

game engine?!! are you kidding? this is just a terrain renderer!.

Doesn't take much to go from one to the other. Sound, physics, lighting.. All things implemented or being implemented currently.
http://www.outerra.com/forum/viewforum.php?id=9

[Abc94]

I laughed at Shawn's post!

[knackered]

well abc94, that's very telling.
ZeosPantera, okey dokey, off you go then, draw up the functional requirements for a game engine. What you've just said is an insult to all the hard work the people at epic/crytek/id/criterion etc. The arrogance is breathtaking and totally misguided.

[necro]

But zeo is right. A game engine is also just a derivation of an engine. Especially outerra has some features of a gameengine. You can drive vehicles by using an approximated physic-engine. So why you are crying? E.g. Ogre is a gameengine and supports the same things as outerra does. Outerra probably even more. Outerra has the possiblity to add content on each coord and some kind of interaction. In my eyes it seems to be very close to _your_ definition of a gameengine.

Even in ogre you have to implement the logic for firing guns. There is no logic brick which does that for you. Nevertheless Ogre is a gameengine.

So please, stop trolling around if your comprehension doesnt barely suffices..

Btw. i dont think that epic will cry a lot of tears if you compare their engine with outerra.

[MiB]

I believe, nobody here wants to disregard work of people at epic, crytek, id, criterion, ... and at least 20 more (note: 20 is blind guess ... put 50 there if you like ... ) ... (various sizes of companies as well as their products ... )

As well as nobody wants to disregard what them guys at Outerra do ...

So let's have a look at wiki ... what it says about Game Engine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine ) :

Let's check with Outerra:
The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes :
- a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics - check,
- a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response) - check (currently Bullet and JBSim engines integration),
- sound - check (AngryPig sent some teaser post about work in progress ... ),
- scripting - check ,
- animation - I've seen some waves on the sea in the outerra ... so ... check (we will be getting more definitelly ...   ),
- artificial intelligence - not yet, but on the list,
- networking - at some level - check,
- streaming - check,
- memory management - check,
- threading - check,
- localization support - not sure about this, but in every normal development - people follow i18n (or something like that ... to some extent),
- and a scene graph - check.

So I would say ... Outerra is a game engine ... too ... (I believe, that Cameni himself used an term somewhere: rendering engine)
(currently it's rendering some amount of screens per second ... (as said with some extent of humour) )
It's being developed with modularity in mind ... so it might be used as an simulation platform (in the scientific sense), if you plug in what you need ... and I believe many more ... (I'm not in the mood to go through this forums to look for all proposed possible usages of this engine ... plenty ... )

There is one important term : (Game) Engine Tools ... as far as I know ... it's getting better in that area too ...

So ... work in progress ... and I wish it stays like that for next 20 years+ ... it would mean it was sucessful ... and is being used ... and old features refactored (where required) ... new added ... etc. etc. ... ;-)

Yeah ... evolution ... ;-)

cheers,
Miro

[Tottel]

It's not an insult, Knackered.

A game engine is not that hard to make; however, adding all the extra functionality is.

[yhwhluver]

Just to reiterate what others have stated.  This was just a hobby and only in the past one or two years has it become full-time development for two guys.  Do you really expect something like Crysis when those other companies have way more employees than two?

[Abc94]

game engine?!! are you kidding? this is just a terrain renderer!

Knackered, they've mentioned many times that they want to make their own game with Outerra.  I'm pretty sure that if they managed to build an engine like this from scratch with only two (or three) people, they should know very well what their own engine is capable of.