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Outerra Tech Demo download. Help with graphics driver issues

Author Topic: Adding features  (Read 14856 times)

Sano

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Adding features
« on: March 24, 2010, 01:34:22 am »

First i have to accept that this simulator is extremely and highly detailed, it is outstanding graphics and vehicle render, may i say my Idea?

I have crazy ideas.

I will tell the Ideas in list as this section is for Ideas and suggestions, Is this only a free out terrian as the name ( i think) says Out terrain or outstanding terrain, there should not be any things like buildings ?

1.Animals , birds,fish can be added if possible.
2.Traffic of cars on road can be added.
3.airports can be built
4.a city is nice to see.
5.river rafting and skiing is really nice.
6.Sky diving is also cool.
7.realistic planes and cars, can be bought from real world textures and inserted in this simulation
8. pedestrians can walk around and have picnic in nice green.
9.Volcanic eruption can be created, and other natural disasters.
10.each climates according to the terrain in that place.
11.Adding ships and trains is a good way of trainsport
12.aircraft carrier in middle of the ocean eg. the pacific ocean.The ship can be powered by nuclear.Thats unlimited when i saw it.
13.aircraft of different states can be built in this simulator as this engine is extremely high tech, aircraft like Airbus A380-800 and F-18 hornet
14. damage of vehicle can be inserted according to the terrain if the vehicle hits the tree it gets damaged a bit, if a plane crashes on ground it's down body can be damaged highly, or landing on a water can be splashing.

Thats the Ideas i can give right now.When will the Demo be release? I have told this to all of my friends, and they will be coming here as soon as they hear my topic in other forums, I can't wait for the Demo , ok whats the size of the game i heard it was 192 GB and after some thing you done, it got into 14-15 GB, so is the full is 14-15 or just the demo?
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cameni

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« Reply #1 on: March 24, 2010, 04:05:36 am »

Hi Sano,
The list of ideas you presented is pretty much a TODO list we have already, albeit not in that particular order.

But you should also know that Outerra is not a simulator, it's a world engine in a relatively early stage of development. It can be eventually used to make a simulator, even a complex one you've outlined, but it can be also used to make other types of games and applications in visualization and simulation areas. So we may not necessarily add all the features related to specific game using the engine in this stage of development. Making a complex simulator would be cool but it's also a very complex task and we are just a small team now. We will be adding stuff we need primarily for our first game, other features will come later as needed.

There was some preliminary support for buildings already, but we are now working on a more complex implementation that will enable us to render large cities effectively. I hope this will be soon contained in a blog update.

We will not be doing a walking pedestrians and animals rendering at the moment, this is a game specific thing - we are just making support for animated models. Other things you mention that are specific to games using the engine are the same case.

It will be also possible to make real airports, either by processing raster aerial images to a compatible format, or by using vector data to define it. But this also will come only later, when it will be used to make a simulator.

The release of the demo depends on one external thing we cannot directly affect, namely the ATI/AMD drivers. You see, we are using all the most recent features of graphics rendering API, and the AMD drivers currently have bugs that render the engine unusable, and we don't want to lose time on search for workarounds when the drivers will be eventually fixed and there's so much work elsewhere.
Apart from that, we also want to be sure the demo runs well, so we are also optimizing various parts of the engine and fixing various bugs.

Those 14GB is terrain dataset for the whole Earth. However, it's downloaded progressively via bittorrent/http protocol, and it works in such way that if you descended from space perpendicularly to a particular spot on Earth, it needs to download only some 15MB of data, if I remember it right. For a reasonably fast connection it means you can drop from the sky with the speed of a meteor and still fall seamlessly into the grass. Further data are automatically downloaded and cached as you are moving away. The demo may also contain some data from the start. For example, the data for +z 3,2 region are somewhere around 300MB.
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Cadabra

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« Reply #2 on: March 24, 2010, 05:33:38 am »

Cameni,

If not a secret, how many people are on your team?
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cameni

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« Reply #3 on: March 24, 2010, 05:45:04 am »

No, not a secret, I think I mentioned it somewhere already. We are just 2 programmers working full time on it, and several others working part time or under a contract. So we are a really small independent developer and I'm sure everybody understands we cannot take over the world in just few weeks :)
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Sano

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« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2010, 06:19:35 am »

Hmm.... you guys made a cool engine, man i just couldn't believe my eyes that just 2 full time on it does this like a hell out of it.
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cameni

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« Reply #5 on: March 24, 2010, 07:51:26 am »

Well we are full time only starting this year .. we were working on it in our free time for around 2 years, until we decided it's too cool to bother with anything else :)

So we left our jobs where we were working on multidimensional database engine and GPU computing algorithms and other things, and started this venture. We have a wide range of experiences in many areas, and I always had chance to work on special things almost unconstrained. And luckily we also complement each other very well.
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Sano

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« Reply #6 on: March 24, 2010, 11:47:19 pm »

A question.... Is this engine can create a game like this?And Is outerra a game?Because it looks so realistic , i think it needs a large amount of disk space, i have no problem, i have 20 TB hard drive ;)
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cameni

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« Reply #7 on: March 25, 2010, 01:56:18 am »

Do you mean if it can be used to create a game like the one you've outlined above?
One of the things we would like to do with it surely is such a global simulator, no doubt about it. But you have to understand that it's an enormous task too, one that would need a serious funding and expanding the team. Now, it is possible this will happen eventually, but in the meantime we are working on a smaller game that will be using and showcasing this engine, a game with more manageable scope for such a small team.

The large amount of disk space is never needed at one time, it's just the size of the global dataset you'd need if you decided to visit every place on earth on surface. Even then it doesn't have to hold all the data, it can download them easily again when needed. I assume there will be a fixed limit for downloaded data and old chunks will be discarded to make space for new data. The limit could be 500-1000MB or lower without noticeable impact.
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Sano

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« Reply #8 on: March 26, 2010, 09:39:25 pm »

Nice, i think this enigne will create an extreme simulator after 5-10 years XD, by then this team you have will be much much bigger.
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KuMoNKo

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« Reply #9 on: June 18, 2010, 04:46:48 am »

Hi.
first of all, good job here since my last (and i think first) post. Outerra is now an awesome engine i think, if we do not count ATI users (i being one of them :( )

To the point...

¿Is it possible to use the road generation method to generate rivers on-the-fly?¿have you thought about it?
would be a really interesting feature... and really good screenshots :P
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cameni

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« Reply #10 on: June 18, 2010, 05:25:58 am »

Quote from: KuMoNKo
¿Is it possible to use the road generation method to generate rivers on-the-fly?¿have you thought about it?
would be a really interesting feature... and really good screenshots :P
Yep, just don't tell anyone ;)

Riverbeds can be created by a custom road profile with an appropriate shape. Such a "road" will be placing some underwater material instead of the asphalt. These empty riverbeds could be created even now, but there will be another shader creating the animated water surface on the marked places.

Transitional area (the one that is used to blend the roads into the terrain) could be used to boost the probability of tree growth along the riverbanks.

Yep, I'm sure the rivers could be made perfect using this technique.
And we love how the engine architecture allows us to do these things :cool:
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MatthewS

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« Reply #11 on: June 21, 2010, 10:05:32 pm »

Quote from: cameni
Well we are full time only starting this year .. we were working on it in our free time for around 2 years, until we decided it's too cool to bother with anything else :)

Full time... excellent!  I thought this was been worked part time on as a "hobby".

You're on a winner, but you know that.   Outerra=Mega$$$ for you!
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Alen Bajrovic

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« Reply #12 on: July 03, 2010, 01:06:57 am »

GREETINGS FOR  ADMINISTRATOR ! Your engine look awesome :DDDDDD! good job :) i think, this is  good start to make flight simulator better than FSX :))  so just continue and GOODLUCK . :cool: cool: cool:
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