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[cloudpillow]

Outerra + procedural CityEngine + Newton Game Dynamics+ bulletphysics + Natural Motion Euphoria + HydroEngine +
= Ultimate Gaming Engine?


Why has there not been anyone who has created a framework. platform or fundamental "engine" that emulators and/or simulates *everything*? From the smallest quantum mechanical scales to classical macro Newtonian physics to cosmic scales of relativity and incorporating a scale-invariant "simulator of everything"... this is, after all, what our universe actually IS! So of course it has to be self-referentially and self-recursively possible to model our models!

The universe started (according to the big bang) started at the moment of inception as one infinitely dense particle, and it was the quantum randomness of that particle that gave way to the non-homogenous and non-isotropic universe that we witness today, through an inflationary period shortly after some units of planck time. The QM randomness affected the 'original' particle and the effects are far reaching, spacing vast regions of the physical universe that we see today.

The Outerra engine is a break-through. I've always known something like this was possible and I'm glad to see it finally coming to fruition... But why does it not attempt to go even further and simulate the particle scales and also the cosmic scales?

As far as I am aware, every game/simulation/etc to date that has ever existed only simulates (at best) classical Newtonian physics. Even in simulators like OrbiterSim that do planetary simulations very well, relativity is not taken into account. I can create a spaceship magically capable of going faster than the speed of light and nothing strange ever happens.

On the other end, no simulation has ever taken into account quantum mechanics on the micro scales. You even have things like the Blue Brain Project that try to functionally emulate the entire human brain on the cellular/neural level, but the model doesn't take into account the effects of QM! Sure the Blue Brain approach is better than the simplistic "point neurons" that came before it, but without QM being simulated in the simulation they cannot ever hope to accurately simulate the molecular effects and thus the cellular effects that arise and emerge from the lower level domains.

There is no A.I. in games. No game or simulator has true 'human' modeled artificial intelligence. Chess doesn't count. Board games are for the most part all considered "solved" and NP complete. As far as most games goes, pathfinding should NOT be considered as "AI"... The deterministic scripts that run the planes in simulators are not "artificially intelligent" even though we refer to them as AI.

This is also why no ELIZA bot will ever pass any true "Turing Test"... Human language (written and oral) evolved as a reductive symbolic tool to help assist intrapersonal and interpersonal communication of information in complex systems (the human brain). Its assbackwards to try and create an AI talking bot by somehow cramming in a bunch of cleverly worded phrases in such and such a way as to emulate natural human language and fool the human into believing the verbot is "AI".. To make a genuine emulation of human language a system as complex as the human itself would be required. Language is an emergent property of such a complexity of neurons, it cannot be simulated away with a bunch of if...then...else statements!

Graphically, we have come a long way since the days of DOOM. But sadly as far as artificial intelligence goes, NPC's in the latest Crysis are just as dumb and overly simplistic as the zombies back in 95. If this wasn't the case, surely multiplayer and online play would not have retained the lure that it has today. Playing with AI is just not as immersive, dynamic and interactive as opposed to real humans, and it shows.

The ultimate game would be a highly scalable, scale-invariant, highly modular and extensible 'universe simulation' platform that allowed anything and everything to be simulated in the same 'existence space' without having to break down each of these simulations into their own respective, independent and isolated component aspects. All the great simulations that we have today are piece-wise and only simulate one very limited domain. Most of the games and simulations these days are all still centered around the Dark Ages, when we thought the earth was flat.

With the Quterra engine near completion, I envision a future of gaming where piecemeal specific games can come together in a coherently singular "one world".  For example, in orbitersim we have a planet earth simulated for space simulation, in flight simulator we have a planet earth simulated geared towards aerodynamic flight simulation, for ship simulator we have many coasts, shores, ports, etc of planet earth simulated (and the vast oceans and seas) for ship simulator, for train simulator we have the terrain surrounding railroad tracks simulated to tailor towards the 'train' universe... But why have some many different "earths" when we can have ONE EARTH?

In theory, nothing prevents Flight Simulator from sharing the same earth with a game like OrbiterSim, and both of these games sharing the same earth with a sim like Ship Simulator, and submarine simulator and train simulator.... Why hasn't this ever been implemented before?

[cameni]

Why has there not been anyone who has created a framework. platform or fundamental "engine" that emulators and/or simulates *everything*? From the smallest quantum mechanical scales to classical macro Newtonian physics to cosmic scales of relativity and incorporating a scale-invariant "simulator of everything"... this is, after all, what our universe actually IS! So of course it has to be self-referentially and self-recursively possible to model our models!

Because it's simply not possible with current and near future hardware. And for quantum simulation I would say it's not possible at all because it would need all the atoms of the universe to simulate itself. At the moment we can describe quantum variables only using a complex system comprised of many states .. with limited resources it's able to simulate only a tiny bit of universe. And it won't scale.
If I wanted only and only to simulate Earth or universe to the smallest detail, I would not bother with Outerra, as there's no chance in my life time. Maybe I'd try to capture a snapshot of my brain quantum state, to be eventually restored on a futuristic hardware

What Outerra brings to the table is just the ability to extend the range of details in the world. Usually, existing games and sims can support only a certain range of details, with ratios between the smallest and largest detail being like 1:10,000 at best. In Outerra it's like 1:100,000,000 when we compare size of the whole planet to the size of ground level details that can be created.
But of course, Outerra "cheats" by using procedural generation.

But the vision of a common platform for simulator is something we are after, it will be made possible because of the widened detail range able to encompass all simulation cores.

[cloudpillow]

But of course, Outerra "cheats" by using procedural generation.

Yes, this is what I was suggesting when I was referring to quantum mechanical simulation in the micro scales and relativity on the cosmic scales. In a sense, 'classical' macro laws of physics is simply the 'averaged-out' emergence of quantum effects... so it would not be necessary to model each individual particle/atom/molecule/etc just to model 'macro' objects. In the simulator world, just as in real life, at the everyday macro scales the approximations of Newtonian and classical physics do indeed suffice.

As you said, Outerra "cheats" by using procedural generation, it too can 'cheat' again by addressing the quantum mechanical aspects in a piecewise/piecemeal manner... basically the OT world abides by classical physics, but allows the user to "zoom-in" arbitrarily (or down to planck length, etc; we don't want to bump into Zeno's paradox with the Real systems)  and "see" (perhaps with instruments like microscopes or electroscopes, etc) the granularity of the world at the smallest particle scales. Once the user zooms-out back to the macro world the underlying QM world disappears to be replaced again by averages that are functionally simulated at a much more simplistic level. The correspondence-limit can be approximately tweaked so that the two domains never meet nor do they overlap.. In essence, since the user spends the vast majority of his time in the macro classical realms, the QM stuff doesn't come into existence until it is consciously observed... (which ironically parallels how the real QM works, making me wonder if our universe could be a simulation?)

As for relativistic effects, again this doesn't even kick in or come into play until something starts weighing somewhere in the order of magnitude of the mass of our sun, or some particle or object travels at 90%+ the speed of light, etc... So in theory it should not be hard to implement. Although time-dilation might present itself as a problem when spaceships in the game start traveling near relativistic speeds on online multilayer modes.

[cloudpillow]

But the vision of a common platform for simulator is something we are after, it will be made possible because of the widened detail range able to encompass all simulation cores.

Yes, like I remarked above, as it currently stands Flight Simulator, OrbiterSim, Fighter Jet simulators, Ship Simulator, Train Simulator, and submarine simulators can already (should already) be packaged as one holistic solution in ONE EARTH. There is no reason for these games to be inherently separated. Why create a different "Earth" for each of these simulators when one complete "earth" will do the trick? It just seems like each game is in its own little "corner of the world", and its not complete unless it is fully integrated. I want to be able to fly PMDG 747-400, NASSP APOLLO, F-18, sail a Cruise Ship, drive a freight train, command a nuclear submarine, etc all within the confines of a single simulator!

My worry is that Outerra is concentrating too much (as the name suggests) on being a scale-invariant procedural/fractal terrain engine and not enough on the emphasis of being a "Everything Engine"...

OT does the terrain already very vigorously... but what about procedural generation of major cities? Okay maybe not CityEngine but what about something like this: http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/ ? Subversion is a bit too abstract for my tastes, but as you can see it should be possible for Outerra to have an infrastructural engine at least as robust as Introversion's procedural city/street/building/room generation engine, if not even better.

It seems that procedural/fractal programming for content creation in sims/games are having a comeback in terms of popularity. Even now there are other indie efforts/pipedreams? being started on the next Minecraft clone/killer ( http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=12123 )

The problem with a project like Project Frontier (what I linked to above) is that the grid is still flat and the sunrise and sunset are "hardcoded" into the game instead of emulating what it really means to have a sun"rise" or sun"set"... In the context of a "flat" world the term "sunrise" has no meaning! While this kind of trick might work in a limited domain world, if we are to have many worlds or having multiple interplanetary travel will require a real 'sun'/'stars' and N-body Newtonian gravitation physics, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, etc... You can't just 'hardcode' the sunrise and sunset for each planet and expect it to be realistic...

The problem I see is that each game (train, flight simulator, ship simulator, etc) specializes in its own area (nothing wrong with that) at the EXPENSE of realism by utilizing cheap parlor tricks and smokes and mirrors that in totality creates contradictions and incompatibilities when one wants to incorporate many different types of games/sims onto one single platform... In isolation these shortcuts and cheats work fine for the simulation platform in question, but together these shortcuts do not lead themselves to be readily reconcilable under a single coherent and consistent worldview.  The only way to reconcile these different platforms is to create one platform or framework that all other games and simulations can extent from.

For example, in every single fighter jet game I've always played the "sonic boom" was never taken into consideration.... I'm not even talking about simulating the air molecules and deriving or emerging the phenomenon of a sonic boom as an object approaches the speed of sound, no games has ever even tried to use table lookup values of altitude, temperature, airspeed, etc to cheaply simulate a sonic boom on any level! The jet engines are loud and noisy and have plenty of sound, but I guess they forgot the sonic boom for some reason. But they both operate on the same principle of sound! Why emulate on and not the other?

Same thing with the speed of light. Games like Universe Sandbox lets you play God in a planetary sim... I can erase the "Sun" and from the vantage point of the earth it is instantly gone! So I guess either the speed of light is infinite, or like the example with the "sonic boom", the mechanics (or rather the "speed") of light is never taken into account... Hey in a FPS or flight simulator it would be crazy to take into account the speed of light, but in a planetary sim most stars are lightyears away, and it takes a substantial amount of time for light from the other planets in our solar system to reach earth... One would think something as critical as this would be emulated, but it is not!

So Outerra affords us the ability to utilize the entire earth and all its vastness... I'm not going to go on top of a mountain top and repeat Galileo's failed experiment to measure the speed of light... But is the "sun" implemented correctly? Can I reenact the measurement of earth's curvature by using a sundial? Is the speed of sound emulated in the OT world? If there is a distant explosion will I see the flash before I hear the sound? If a tree falls in the Outerra forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

These are the things that a vast world entail... I hope Outerra will try to emulate as many of these as possible. Commensurate with the simulation of sheer size is the obligation to emulate effects which are discernible in those scales and ranges.

[cloudpillow]

One more thing....

Of the "five senses" the two most predominant ones are sight (visuals) and sound (audio/hearing)... in the context of a computer game/sim we obviously do not have the sense of smell, touch, taste or inertia... so really it just boils down to sight and sound...

I'm not saying Outerra should simulate each air molecule in realtime on the fly, but it should at least take the speed of sound into account whenever long distances come into the equation... if you fire a gun in an open field it makes no sense for the game to calculate the speed of sound and then implement a delay... but if you are in a grande canyon and fire off a weapon it should calculate the distance to the canyon walls and offer a realistic echo effect... and likewise for distance explosions it should offer an emulated sound delay...

If you are going to have such a large world its going to look and sound funny when, for example, you see AND hear lightening AND thunder at exactly the same time (Microsoft Flight Simulator had a nasty habit of doing this)...  Speaking of, where is the weather effects (clouds, rain, hail, tornadoes, etc) in this engine? Will they be procedurally or fractally implemented as well? From the ground level looking straight, weather is 50% of everything!

The Earth is 70%+ water... So how are the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, etc simulated? Is water realistically simulated? For example in a ship simulator water simulation becomes far more important than when it is just a flight simulator... and in a submarine simulator the speed of sound in water and isothermal layer etc become vital to the proper simulation and enjoyment of submarine mechanics.

*Are the basic elements going to be someday emulated correctly? I'm not talking about QM. But lets say someone mines a bunch of uranium and enriches it and builds a nuke... will half-life of radioactive elements in the game be implemented correctly ... and if a nuke actually went off would the terrain, buildings, be realistically affected within the blast radius?

*How is seamless multiplier going to ever work out in such a complex world?

[cameni]

You know, the problem is there was no platform capable of handling all simulations in one world. Flight sims really need huge visibility, and even that could not be done to the extent of what you can see in RL because of technology and hw limits. Getting off the aircraft and walking to a car and driving off while getting the required level of detail in the same app that a while ago showed you 300 miles to horizon? Impossible.
It's what we are trying to achieve in Outerra, because we believe we have such technology, that is also feasible on current hardware level. That's all.

Why not to simulate everything ... well, it's a matter of available resources. Instant light is much cheaper than trying to simulate effects of finite speed of light propagation, or relativistic effects. What would you do if 99% players didn't mind and enjoyed the gameplay anyway, and you had to save the resources for other things?

Innovation really comes with competition, but it comes only in steps sufficient to outsmart the competitors in some of the areas.
See, we've got a whole planet. Spherical thing. You can land from space on grass blades. See, competition?
And the competition says it has other priorities, that they simulate so many aircraft systems, putting all 6 CPU cores to a crawl and that we can't do it better.

Sun is implemented correctly wrt the position. I mean, the sunlight is. There's no actual sun body yet. You can use sundial to measure planet's curvature, I have to try it some day
Sound is not there yet, but we will handle the delay and attenuation with distance.

[SpaceFlight]

Yes, like I remarked above, as it currently stands Flight Simulator, OrbiterSim, Fighter Jet simulators, Ship Simulator, Train Simulator, and submarine simulators can already (should already) be packaged as one holistic solution in ONE EARTH. There is no reason for these games to be inherently separated. Why create a different "Earth" for each of these simulators when one complete "earth" will do the trick? It just seems like each game is in its own little "corner of the world", and its not complete unless it is fully integrated. I want to be able to fly PMDG 747-400, NASSP APOLLO, F-18, sail a Cruise Ship, drive a freight train, command a nuclear submarine, etc all within the confines of a single simulator!

My worry is that Outerra is concentrating too much (as the name suggests) on being a scale-invariant procedural/fractal terrain engine and not enough on the emphasis of being a "Everything Engine"...

Hello,
as far as I understood, the building of an everything engine with regards to vehicles will be up to the users of OT later on, or modders, or to game studios.

OT does the terrain already very vigorously... but what about procedural generation of major cities? Okay maybe not CityEngine but what about something like this: http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/ ? Subversion is a bit too abstract for my tastes, but as you can see it should be possible for Outerra to have an infrastructural engine at least as robust as Introversion's procedural city/street/building/room generation engine, if not even better.

I think a procedural city generator is in the works or planned after the tree generator is finished.

The problem I see is that each game (train, flight simulator, ship simulator, etc) specializes in its own area (nothing wrong with that) at the EXPENSE of realism by utilizing cheap parlor tricks and smokes and mirrors that in totality creates contradictions and incompatibilities when one wants to incorporate many different types of games/sims onto one single platform... In isolation these shortcuts and cheats work fine for the simulation platform in question, but together these shortcuts do not lead themselves to be readily reconcilable under a single coherent and consistent worldview.  The only way to reconcile these different platforms is to create one platform or framework that all other games and simulations can extent from.

Making OT the single platform for all the different kinds of simulations, is the plan the developers have, I believe.

Speaking of, where is the weather effects in this engine?

Weather effects are planned as well I read somewhere on the forum.

[cloudpillow]

And the competition says it has other priorities, that they simulate so many aircraft systems, putting all 6 CPU cores to a crawl and that we can't do it better.

I've never liked XPlane. Austin brags about his FAA Certified blade element simulation.... but PMDG on the FS is still a much more 'realistic' desktop experience overall... Blade element theory is neat in theory, and it might even be useful for an "Engine of Everything"... but is overkill for a dedicated  'flight simulator' that prides itself on realism... XPlane is not trying to be Outerra... Xplane is a flight simulator...

Blade element theory has no practical benefit when the flight characteristic of most planes that are being simulated already are well known and can be more cheaply emulated with lookup table. Example: Why would  blade element theory be useful for the 747 in the context of a desktop simulator? It would not.. that would be like trying to calculate the thermodynamic energy of all the molecules in my cup everytime I wanted to measure the temperate of my coffee... its (blade element) completely useless and superfluous and bound to errors of over-simulation.

XPlane doesn't really simulate ANY aircraft systems. AeroWinX (the spiritual predecessor to the PMDG 747) was/is a true aircraft SYSTEMS simulator for Boeing 747-400 DOS platform that first introduced back in 1995, and was less than 500KB without sound package.  XPlane still has nothing close to AeroWinx or PMDG in terms of systems simulator on the 747. What a shame.

[cameni]

The Earth is 70%+ water... So how are the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, etc simulated? Is water realistically simulated? For example in a ship simulator water simulation becomes far more important than when it is just a flight simulator... and in a submarine simulator the speed of sound in water and isothermal layer etc become vital to the proper simulation and enjoyment of submarine mechanics.

*Are the basic elements going to be someday emulated correctly? I'm not talking about QM. But lets say someone mines a bunch of uranium and enriches it and builds a nuke... will half-life of radioactive elements in the game be implemented correctly ... and if a nuke actually went off would the terrain, buildings, be realistically affected within the blast radius?

*How is seamless multiplier going to ever work out in such a complex world?

Outerra is primarily concerned with the world rendering and generation of believable details from existing data. As for the simulation aspects, the base system of the engine goes only so deep as to make it believable from some coarser level of view, trying to provide means of rendering various effects in realistic manner, but leaving the control on the respective sims or games that will utilize it. At the moment we have neither the resources nor ambition to cover all these aspects by ourselves, and we aren't trying to overshoot and dissipate our energy too much lest we kill the project in the process.

Essentially, we hope that developers will be able to create simulators on it, without having to focus on terrain creation and rendering themselves again and again, as it's usually the case now.
All aspects of rendering (like the weather effects) are being developed anew, to be compatible with the system we've got, maximizing its performance and coherence. It will take a while, so we are going to pre-release a game that will show what's in there now for players to play with and visionaries to envision