Outerra Engine > Ideas & Suggestions & Questions

Space flight simulator?

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Dunlop:
Hi

First of all, your work is amazing. I just couldnt believe things like this would be possible to do on a GPU, all those fractal calculations and such. Nice to know I was wrong!

I read that you have plans for making other planets like Moon & Mars. Will the engine be able to zoom from planet to planet? Can it display more than one planet on screen? If it can, then  my idea is to make a spaceflight simulator with this engine. There are many possibilities here. It could be a space combat game, with realistic (newtonian) physics or with "StarWars" physics. Or an uber realistic Apollo simulator. It could be alot of work, if its even possible, but the results would be unique surely.

You could check out a freeware space flight simulator named Orbiter. It is an extremely realistic simulation of various real spacecraft and very hard to master, but something on that scale would be impressive with this engine. They have a non graphics beta version on development that could use a planetary graphics engine like this. http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

Or if the game is about combat, then Im thinking something in the style of the good old Elite, in that game you could also land on a planet. Why not combine both space and air combat in one game? The possibilities are endless... :P

cameni:
Thanks!
Yes it will be possible to render multiple planets, so a spaceflight simulator can be done as well. Planets viewed from distance are effective to render. Heavier processing is only required near the planet surface, when other planets are distant and their rendering already cheap.

A game combining space and air combat could be nice too, although I feel that balancing that would not be easy. We didn't fully conceive the scale of our planet until we were able to explore it in the engine, with all the detail available that really changes the perception of space. Making a game where you don't get lost that easily can be a problem ;)
I mean, designing a game like Elite would be surely different here in this context. But I agree that it could be an interesting game too :)

helio2:
What kind of Physics engine are you using for the game? or is it a a custom one? Also how well can it handle space and air Flight?

cameni:
JSBSim for planes and Bullet for ground. Some problems with Bullet when handling planetary terrain, we'll see soon how it can be hacked.

Vora:
Just a spontaneous brain fart...
There is a quite successful space MMO called EVE-Online by CCP who's stated goal for the future is to enable "walking on planets" (right now they are developing a 3D engine for "walking in stations" to be released late this year).
Maybe they are interested in licensing this engine for their planetary thing.

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