Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Heaney]

1. Will this engine be available to the average person, like UDK and Unity are?

2. How much will it cost? Will it be free for casual use and cost for licencing, or a normal and pro version, or what?

3. How easy will this be to use to make a game, if you are more of a modeller than a programer? (Compare to other engines)

4. Will I be able to have multiple planets and have spaceships for players to dynamically fly between them? Even other star systems? What's the limit?

[cameni]

1. Will this engine be available to the average person, like UDK and Unity are?
2. How much will it cost? Will it be free for casual use and cost for licencing, or a normal and pro version, or what?

It should be available to indie developers once we make it into a universal game platform. Platform code will manage world data and allow for distributed world creation and automatic synchronization and delivery of game assets (world data are huge) etc. It should all evolve out of our world sandbox game.
Licensing should be royalty based, allowing creation of both non-commercial and commercial games.

3. How easy will this be to use to make a game, if you are more of a modeller than a programer? (Compare to other engines)

This may be problematic at the beginning; it can be expected that there will be actually higher requirements on programmers than usual, because of the scale, procedural approach and lack of some higher level tools.

4. Will I be able to have multiple planets and have spaceships for players to dynamically fly between them? Even other star systems? What's the limit?

It's possible to have other planets and even star systems, but support for that will only come later as we are focusing initially on Earth and games that will be able to utilize the whole planet and all the detail available. After that we'll add Moon and Mars and possibly other planets and moons for which there are some data usable for their modeling.

[Heaney]

This may be problematic at the beginning; it can be expected that there will be actually higher requirements on programmers than usual, because of the scale, procedural approach and lack of some higher level tools.

So for a modeller like me, it will be hard?

If so, what programming language should I learn?

It's possible to have other planets and even star systems, but support for that will only come later as we are focusing initially on Earth and games that will be able to utilize the whole planet and all the detail available. After that we'll add Moon and Mars and possibly other planets and moons for which there are some data usable for their modeling.

So how long (in years or months) would you say it will be until it supports say, 30 star systems each with about 10 planets?

Also

5. Are cities procedurally generated too?

[cameni]

So for a modeller like me, it will be hard?

If so, what programming language should I learn?

You should probably find a programmer or two for your team
Otherwise, the engine is written in C++, like most of the games out there.

So how long (in years or months) would you say it will be until it supports say, 30 star systems each with about 10 planets?

If we ever get out of our solar system with this, there will be an artificial planet generator, and it won't matter whether there are 30 or 3000 systems - we won't model them manually. However, as I said, we want to focus on our planet first, to exploit fully the potential it provides - and that is enormous. Our focus is shifted towards ground level detail, unlike say Infinity that has relatively rough ground details in comparison but focuses on the space.

How long until there's an explorable universe in Outerra - we can't say. Depends on too many factors. I guess we will be fully occupied with Earth modeling for some time, so a planet generator might come in order only in a year or two, as an experimental feature. Artificial planets could be supported even now, but the output of standard fractal noise generators applied to planets makes them quite boring.

5. Are cities procedurally generated too?

Not yet, but it's in the plan.

[mctash]

Are planning to adapt an intermediate scripting language like lua or a custom one like unreal script to aid in the modding process?

I figure something like lua or some other script would be more accessible to people than interacting directly with the engine in c++.

McTash

[Jak_o_Shadows]

I imagine you're going to pick javascript, or have picked javascript already because of the web-browser interface and the like. If you haven't, I would recommend python or nasal (http://www.plausible.org/nasal/doc.html).

[cameni]

At the moment there's indeed the javascript, as the tools are coded as html/js. But we use code generators commonly so the APIs will be generated from the base C++ ones for every language we decide to support.
Though for game scripting I'd prefer something that can be eventually compiled into native code. A language designed specifically for game scripting .. I still haven't found what I'm looking for :/

[Jak_o_Shadows]

I see. Whatever you do, dont' use a scripting language that has almost identical syntax with another regular programming language. While i can see the postives, not being able to use your regular code is a large annoyance.
Also, flightgear uses nasal.

[cameni]

Whatever you do, dont' use a scripting language that has almost identical syntax with another regular programming language. While i can see the postives, not being able to use your regular code is a large annoyance.

Um, what do you mean here, can you explain?

[Jak_o_Shadows]

Yeah, I'm sorry, that was about as clear as mud. I was referring to Boo (http://boo.codehaus.org/Applications) and Unity 3d. One of the reasons i never got into unity was that i couldn't use regular python programs i had created.