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[monks]

Yes, that's Florian Bosch's work! I know him a little from FaceBook (I'm not on there now though). He's one talented chappie.
He wrote a gpu based terrain modeller using a node network interface- lithosphere -kinda like World Machine but on the gpu- if you know it at all. He never really continued with the development of it though, because I was interested in testing it out and using it but he said he just likes to dabble...his dabbles come out rather well!  I think he's what you call an early adopter, because I know he wrote the gpu modeller some years ago now, and he was straight out the door when webgl came along.
 In terms of game physics that's really my main interest- the water effects. I remember nvidia releasing that very cool waterfall demo for DX 10 geometry shaders, which I've still not dloaded cos only just upgraded to Win7

monks

[Juggernautz]

The game From Dust is pretty much just a Populous style fluid dynamics simulator with some really awesome real-time water simulation and interactions.

[monks]

 Wow, just watching the tsunami scene on YT. That's some water effects! Would be great to see rivers like that in Outerra 

monks

[monks]

I'm in the process of adding in estuaries and the major river valleys that define the geography. When adding the hills and
lowlands there is a tendency for the geographic features to get swamped. This helps divide the land up along the major rivers.
This is a test of a method of creating lowlands and potentially hills too. we also have the option of adding in hills
via GTS procedural texturing. The dem will end being a combination of the two approaches.
I've also sourced dems for the deserts of Africa.  They will replace the stuff currently south of the River Harnen (south of Mordor).

monks



full size: http://www.skindustry.net/medem/files/Phase2/Terrain_1.0/screenies/101012/Tex1.png















monks

[Sam]

WOW, great job made, monk! Awseome! 

[Redrobes]

Yeah these are looking good. Kinda realistic and totally plausible. Very nice.

[monks]

Here's a wip of the desert area of Harad (south of Mordor). It uses dems from the Sahara. I was happy to use it
because there is no software that easily create convincing procedural sand deserts.

Once Outerra's texturing system (biomes) comes online all of the areas will be textured differently. Anteworld will
use MODIS, whereas I'm told, user-defined worlds will use a scripting engine interface.



full size: http://www.me-dem.me.uk/galleries/Development2/Desert_01.png






monks

[monks]

At the moment we're preparing for a version 1.0 release. Maybe that should be 1.5 but who's counting?
 If I travel in a straight line it'll be weeks not months.
 Things to do:
 * Improve the coastlines. The previous version had much better coastlines. Here's a shot of the new stuff. You
 can see that there are many more crinkles and outlets into the sea. The trick is to not affect it so much that
 it changers the map at the edges too much. I'm not sure about the underwater channels. I've not given that much thought to bathymetry yet, but I did download a 1 km res data set recently.
 



 * Finish the lowlands and hills. At the moment the coverage is patchy. It's a case of either creating a multiplication mask
 or directly changing the dem itself. Mask preferred.
 * Add small scale noise to the mountains. This tends to create better mountains when you get in really close to them in Outerra. At the moment this has been done already via the base dem being noised, but that's not an ideal solution, but it would probably achieve the desired result quickly. The other option is to use masks and noise the mountains separately from the rest of the terrain. That would take a bit longer so may not make it into the release.

 The release will be in Outerra's native format packaged up so it can dropped in easily to the install dir. We'll
 have to arrange some download.

monks
 

[cameni]

The easiest way would be to place it on our server so that it gets downloaded automatically (progressively) when people switch the planet. Or perhaps to have a redirection somewhere else, though the integrated terrain data downloader doesn't understand redirects yet.

[monks]

I jumped the gun here a bit, but I really wanted to put it on the immediate horizon. If I don't, it'll never get out of the door!
 Having it on your server would be cool, and it's great of you to offer.

 Does that mean that folks will eventually have it on their hard drives, or will it always be downloaded from each time Outerra is started? Purely from my perspective I don't mind if it gets downloaded to hard drives permanently as wads, whatever. It's a small download of course compared to Earth and Anteworld but that's very much a relative statement!
 I reckon version 1.0 as is will be good to go soon. 2.0 will come around the time of biomes and textures, by which time I'll have added some dem improvements too.
 I thought that I would blog something with a vid and encourage people to sign up for Outerra with it. A full res version would be only available to the Outerra community. We'd perhaps offer a 1/4 res (still a big dem at 10K) to anyone else that's interested. That way the Outerra community gets premium content, as it were. Of course, that's it anyone is interested at all! 

monks

[cameni]

Does that mean that folks will eventually have it on their hard drives, or will it always be downloaded from each time Outerra is started? Purely from my perspective I don't mind if it gets downloaded to hard drives permanently as wads, whatever. It's a small download of course compared to Earth and Anteworld but that's very much a relative statement!

Just as with Earth, it gets downloaded only the first time and then only if the data change on the server. There's a versioning implemented, if you change just a part of the world's source data, only a part of wad files changes and will be downloaded next time.

I thought that I would blog something with a vid and encourage people to sign up for Outerra with it. A full res version would be only available to the Outerra community. We'd perhaps offer a 1/4 res (still a big dem at 10K) to anyone else that's interested. That way the Outerra community gets premium content, as it were.

Hmm, I wonder if it's not going to be problematic because of the known behavior of Sauron's Estate, who may see it as a monetization of their preciousss property. It would be perhaps better to put the data as a zip somewhere like Google Drive and have people download it from there ...

[monks]

Unfortunately I think you may be right about that...would it be ok to make a zipped download of the wads to drop into the data dir?

monks

[cameni]

We can make a simple installer that does all that's needed. But I should make a planet selector into the login screen somewhere, appearing only when there are multiple planets to choose from.

[deathevor]

Actually a very good solution for this was in FSX. They had a menu of installed map  libraries that could be switched on/off one by one. Overtaking other map data based on layer (add-on) position in list (UP/DOWN in the list).
This will work as well if libraries is stored on Outerra's server. The list get's downloaded during login screen and again as with local addons players just tick them (on/off)  and move UP/DOWN in the list.

And this will be easiest way of end-users to modify their own parts of earth without getting lost in files.

The problem might appear in Multiplayer with players having different height maps. However, as I've suggested previously, if the map data will be stored on Outerra's servers, then only host player can choose addons he wants, And anybody who join the session automatically use them from server.

[monks]

Sounds cool! Some good ideas there deathevor. Whatever they have time for really...download +
manual installation would be fine with me, but eventually something more will have to be implemented
for user worlds, maps.

monks