Outerra Engine > News

Tech demo - getting closer

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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
[/list]

[*]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.
[/list]

This topic will be progressively updated as we fix/implement the individual items in it, to keep you all informed.[/list]

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

C. Shawn Smith:

--- Quote from: cameni ---[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 :)  [/*]
[/list]
--- End quote ---

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.  :lol:

Abc94:
WOW!!  It's almost here!! :D :D :D :D

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