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[cameni]

Finally, after a long time we have been able to make Outerra run on ATI cards, after the latest round of fixes and workarounds. The workarounds enable it to run on the latest public drivers, although they come with a small performance penalty. They will be reverted after the fixed beta drivers from AMD pass through to the public channel, which takes 2-3 months.
However, there are still some serious performance issues, and things like two 6870 being slower than a single 4890 probably because of additional crossfire problems.

Things to do before the release:


• Fixing ATI-specific performance issues.
  Apart from using our existing 4xxx and 5xxx cards, we are getting a new 6xxx ATI card for testing, as there seem to be some specific problems with the 6xxx line - both performance and driver crashes. Rare driver crashes were experienced on 4/5xxx cards as well. All of the lines need more performance fixes, some things are apparently more costly to do on ATI than on Nvidia cards.
  There aren't many rendering issues left that are specific to ATI - there's a bug with ocean foam being blocky, and I think that the tree location generator occasionally produces trees on slightly different positions, between ATI and Nvidia.
  
• Bittorrent downloader for terrain data in the demo
  There was an older version of bittorrent downloader already working, but because of some issues it's been disabled. We need to compile a newer one and fix the integration code that was occasionally losing events. Note that our game will use a more reliable download of data from cloud, but for the free demo mode we need to handle the traffic in a less costly way.
  
• Sounds
  Without the sounds the experience is only partial, so we are implementing both environmental and engine sounds. Environmental sounds will be of two kinds - periodic background sounds that come from multiple points in space, like the rustling of leaves and sea waves, and the second category will be point sources like birds, crickets and such.
  Just don't go looking for them
  
• Final terrain processing
  There are some issues left to be fixed in the terrain dataset. A great pacific wall along 180° of longitude. Array of pikes sticking from the ocean below Iceland. Ugly aliasing on shores where the sea depth dataset reports bigger depths right close to the shore. Probably not all of them will be fixed.
  
  • fix source tiles
  • fix mapressor artifacts
  • fix shores and terrain depressions
  
  
• HW&driver detection, system info
  To avoid excessive error reporting we have to early check the hardware for minimum requirements, and driver versions to be greater or equal to the verified and supported ones. The code that checks if current version of OpenGL driver in the system requires enabling the workarounds comes here as well.
  
• Integrated bug reporting
  A way of easy bug reporting, automatic inclusion of generated logs etc. Will be needed for game beta testers.
  
• UI for video and quality settings (resolution, lock refresh rate, terrain quality metrics)
  Early versions won't be yet fully optimized, so there will be higher minimum recommendations for a good performance. A GTX 460 or better is recommended, but for weaker cards we need to provide the means of adjusting the quality settings in-game. All these settings are currently accessible only through configuration files, and we need to make at least a simple UI interface for it.
  
• Spawn point selection
  We plan to have several entry points selectable on Earth, that people will be able to select the first time. It will serve two main purposes: data for these points should be more readily available via P2P protocol than they would be if everyone selected an arbitrary point, and secondly, these places will also contain some demo infrastructure visible only there, since the first demo will be probably read-only - no editing, that's something to be left for the game. Rest of the world can be explored from there, with the position being saved on exit.
  
This topic will be progressively updated as we fix/implement the individual items in it, to keep you all informed.

[Tottel]

Fantastic news!
I'm looking forward to the release; or at least to the next news update.

[C. Shawn Smith]

[list=*]

• Sounds
  Without the sounds the experience is only partial, so we are implementing both environmental and engine sounds. Environmental sounds will be of two kinds - periodic background sounds that come from multiple points in space, like the rustling of leaves and sea waves, and the second category will be point sources like birds, crickets and such.
  Just don't go looking for them  [/*]
  

Can't wait to see the first video popup with that .  I remember that one video where you overlayed the cricket chirps post-processing, and it really sold the scene.  At the end of the Retrospective video, where I placed the seagulls and the ocean, I had a number of friends and family actually looking to find the seagulls in the shot, and were disappointed when they didn't see them lol.

[WarlockSyno]

Ahh yeah! Can't wait!
Lucky enough to have a GTX 460 SE too.  

[Abc94]

WOW!!  It's almost here!!

[pico]

Congratulations!  

[yhwhluver]

Man, I'm in serious need of a newer computer.  

[Jak_o_Shadows]

I'm sure that if you missed any terrain bugs, someone will spot em. Anyway, awesome!

[newS]

I'm very happy  

[corona]

Great news.

Also, I have a 6870 .... just saying if you need someone to test on those 6 Series cards....  :-) (and yes, I would test properly and give u guys test reports and all that)

[Tottel]

I would gladly volunteer for testing as well(ATI firepro M7820 card), but I can imagine it's probably a whole lot of data-streaming.

[ZeosPantera]

I presume biomes for desert, jungle and arctic will come later.

Glad to finally see this post!

[angrypig]

Hi guys

We bought AMD 6850 last Friday, which should be only slightly slower than NV 460. But in Outerra it looks like it has got only 40% power of the 460 now. I was testing it on AMD 4.2 OpenGL beta driver which is the only public one with fixes we need for Outerra.

Now we need to analyze it and find out what is causing the performance issues. I've already made a few changes, today I will test it again and let you know if it was worth it.

Another news:
I've implemented a basic sound system based on OpenAL. It is very early version so it is not very usable yet, but i was able to add engine sound to the cessna with correct positioning. Doppler effect is sometimes very funny especially when i am flying in UFO mode around the aircraft

[Abc94]

I've implemented a basic sound system based on OpenAL. It is very early version so it is not very usable yet, but i was able to add engine sound to the cessna with correct positioning. Doppler effect is sometimes very funny especially when i am flying in UFO mode around the aircraft

That's pretty cool.  When you think it's ready enough you should make another video showing the sounds, as well as that weird doppler effect "effect", really curious about what that sounds like.  

[Bartolomeus]

Yes, awesome news from Outerra!