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[Terra-fan]

Hello I was wondering what types of inputs outerra uses to create terrain and sea shores procedurally, I have many questions and im a real noob when it come to any sort of programming , questions like:

Can data be fed to Outerra to make custom generated alien earth like planets?

Are there plug-ins that accomplish this?

Is it too hard to make outerra do this/outerra not optimised for this feature?

and finally a question for highly experienced programmers out here, how would you go about creating a plug-in that can spit out custom worlds with data sets?

Thank you, for any and all answers 

 

[cameni]

Right now we are using custom terrain compilation tools to produce planets viewable in OT. These are a bit complicated to use and ever changing, so for now only we can produce planets using data that people give us in sufficient detail and quality.

And that is actually the hard part. OT doesn't specialize on generating coarse terrain structures (yet), it assumes terrain elevation data are at least in around 100m resolution and it only refines it below that. The same algorithms will work on coarser data, but it doesn't look that nice.

Generating planet data at 100m via some external tools is quite problematic at that scale; so far only the ME-DEM project was able to pull it off with basic elevation and color data. There was another promising project, but given the whole process is demanding (weeks and months of processing at that scale) it wasn't finished.
Setting up and importing the planet once you have the data is sophisticated but we can do it relatively quickly, we can do that.

I'm a terrain gen freak myself, and I'd like to create a planet creator tool based on OT one day, that would allow to skip the complicated step of generating the input data, and integrate it into in-game tools instead that enable artistic input at various levels of detail and automatic procedural refinement. However, as you may guess, that's by no means an easy task ...

[Terra-fan]

Thank you Cameni for such an awsome answer.

I've only played with the demo so I'm going to purchase the alpha release and explore more. I might have to upgrade my motherboard and GPU though. I would also like to see rapid generation of unique worlds with an easy tool as game design and realism is a passion of mine as well. 

OT and the base Earth model are not far from this goal, swap out a few colors and meshes and a few textures and sounds and the Earth model would look rather alien.

Cheers!

[Acetone]

Thank you Cameni for such an awsome answer.

I've only played with the demo so I'm going to purchase the alpha release and explore more. I might have to upgrade my motherboard and GPU though. I would also like to see rapid generation of unique worlds with an easy tool as game design and realism is a passion of mine as well. 

OT and the base Earth model are not far from this goal, swap out a few colors and meshes and a few textures and sounds and the Earth model would look rather alien.

Cheers!

Actually, you can change atmospheric parameters and end up with a very alien world. For example, it's easy to get a Mars feeling when you set yourself in the middle of the Chad desertic regions with tweaked atmo. I also recomment adding atmospheric parameters to the Moon, it's... unique

[aWac9]

Let's see how the planet Mars is from Curiosity.
gravity : 3,711 m/s²