We plan to use the engine for our own production, but we are also open to license it, depending on the project and the developer. Ultimately we would like to turn it into a game platform that directly supports indie developers, where they could acquire an instance (realm) of the world and add their assets to turn it into a game of their choice, with the platform code taking care of distribution of world data etc.
But that's still a bit distant. Initially we want to make our demo game, a world colonization style. As for the collaboration, we are already working with a few skilled people that offered help in the form of models, characters etc, hopefully the results of this cooperation will show up soon. Our game should serve as a testing sandbox too, being able to import models and define vehicles. But until that's ready, we can try importing your models (the process has still some user-unfriendly steps in it) to see how it would look in the engine. We would actually like to find a designer who's capable to create models for the game, that would be consistent with the world and will give it a specific look.
another question is if you allow betatesters also to test uploaded maps , and custom handpaint or hand worked solutions like outputs from terragen , worldmachine , geocontrol 2 , vue or else ....
there will be any shaping inworld tools for terrain etc?
While our primary focus is to reconstruct the essence of Earth before the civilization, with tools that will be capable of creating the civilization layer atop of it, we are already working with people who use it to create custom lands - the
ME-DEM project. So in the end there will be ability to create custom planets from user data, though it will be probably a different product from the base "earth engine" we've got now.
My secret goal is to create a planet maker where you'd be able to define continents, draw mountain ranges and major rivers, and a generator will be able to refine it down to the detail level of earth data, simulating erosion and other natural processes. It would enable you to create your own outline for the planet, and then refine parts of it which need to be specifically handled, but still have the rest of the world fully defined.
Will be able to support voxel sculpting in order to make more interesting terrain features like outruding surfaces and erosion systems?
Outerra uses lateral displacement to create outruding terrain, but the process is not controllable (yet). There's a possibility how this could work though - by applying a displacement mesh, that would take the control but still could leave the fine details on the normal refinement process.
Anyway, it will be an OT-specific process.
Will there be any plan for dynamic fluid system like fluvial systems , erosions and other atmosferic effects interaction?
Only as a part of the planet creator thing. The engine itself will use the resulting terrain and vector river databases.
Nature cycles ? like flora fauna cycles in seasons , days years etc?
Planned, but it needs a lot of vegetation and ecotype models, won't be soon.
interactive dynamic and dramatic changes in geology like earthquakes , tsunamis , tornadoes , meteor swarms etc?
Hmm, didn't think about it yet. Probably wouldn't be worth the effort for games.
AI systems for human or lively forms interaction ingame?
That's game specific, but could use some support from the engine.
I-Novae is probably the closest engine to Outerra in the universe of engines, although the differences aren't small. They focus more on space and don't go that much into ground level detail, whereas our focus is shifted more towards the ground level detail and we won't cover the outer space initially. We also aren't fond of purely fractal generated worlds, as they are self-similar (much like the definition of fractals says) and can be pretty boring and unnatural. That's why we focus on the use of real or artificially modeled terrain data, at least until we can come up with multilayer algorithms capable of generating fractal planets that are realistic and interesting.
So, while there's a common overlapping area, both engines focus on different things.
Differences to other engines - well, there aren't many with support for spherical planetary bodies and really large terrains, procedural generation, pre-made worlds that are to be modded instead of plain level to be populated ..
Of course, the disadvantage is that procedural engines need custom tools and different approaches that may not suit all.
