Illusion Aerobatic Team

Outerra is a new 3D Game engine - with many possible applications, we sent a few questions to Brano Kemen, to explain what it can do :

Can you tell us a bit about you and your team and your plans ?

For about three years it was basically just a hobby, but as its potential became gradually more and more evident, we decided to fully focus on its development. We are now working in parallel on the engine and on a game that will showcase it.

Our plans may change, but there is a serious push in the direction of a Flight Simulator, but as a small team we have to play it safe, so the aim is currently a game that will demonstrate the engine's potential and secure us some additional income channels to enable us then to take on a more ambitious games.

We are two programmers that decided to start a project, but there are others cooperating with us already - so as needed, we can expand our team in the future.

What is that you are trying to achieve with Outerra - in which way it is different form FSX or other sims ?

Outerra is a special game engine for future games that would use whole planets or need huge terrain areas.

I have been toying with terrain rendering for quite some time before we started on this engine, and my goal always was to have all the detail required for a ground based game, while also having the maximum possible visibility. As a result the engine can render a planet from space and zoom seamlessly down to the surface.

Outerra is not a simulator in itself, but a graphic engine that can be used to make one. In the demo we integrated it with JSBSim flight dynamics engine that models the movement and forces of aircraft, and with Bullet physics engine used to handle the ground vehicle physics.

The essence of Outerra is its terrain rendering system. The important difference between it and the 3D engines of the simulators you mentioned is the way how it uses fractals for data refinement. Raster datasets have a finite resolution and if one used a high resolution data it would take enormous space ant still it will not be sufficient for ground level rendering. We took a different approach : datasets are refined by fractal algorithms that try to mimic natural appearance , and there is always a detailed, believable terrain created down to the level required for the scene rendered. Several techniques were developed for this to be possible, many of which are mentioned in the blog.

Of course, it's still a long way to go until we implement all that we planned and until the engine becomes feature complete, but I'm glad that most of the people that saw the videos could already see its potential.

I've noticed that Outerra is appealing mainly to people that dream about a global simulator, where you'd be able to drive with a car or train simulator to an airport, fly a plane to a spaceport and so on. That's the ultimate dream of many, and I'd say that with Outerra that dream really appears possible for the first time. It is also our ultimate goal. We will be also doing Moon and Mars or any planet for which there are some usable data sets, it's actually easier to do that than Earth, so the possibilities can be extended even further.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVjCetERjN8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNw7_lyxPmA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoDOPFIiesg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqIFG2t ... re=related

Greetings

woow

We would like to release a public demo when we stabilize the functionality and resolve some of the more serious issues. A major problem are the AMD OpenGL 3.2 driver bugs. As the engine quite depends on the new features, these bugs render the AMD graphic cards unusable now. As many of users have AMD cards we have to have this fixed. We are working to resolve these issues with AMD but their reaction times are rather slow. Still, it's better than when they were ATI.

So what will probably be in the demo:
* Tatra 815
* Cessna 172
* A free camera controller (UFO mode with limits)
* terrain data will be downloaded by bittorrent (but we are still resolving how and where to seed the data)
* there will be probably only one land type with one or two tree types and there won't be grass blades (only as texture)

Regarding the performance, as there are few posts in other forums whether Outerra needs a super computer to run. The minimum configuration is a dual core CPU and a SM4 graphics card with at least 512MB memory and performance similar to Nvidia 8800GT. With this configuration you will get at least 30FPS. This is what we are getting in the current development version which is not optimized very well, but there is also still lot of stuff missing like the building etc.

What is this?:



Outerra is a unique 3D rendering engine that is also a world engine capable to seamlessly render whole planets from space down to the surface. It can use arbitrary/varying resolution of elevation data that it further dynamically refines using fractal algorithms. The fractals try to mimic natural processes, generating fine, believable terrain with high resolution. The world is also being dynamically textured and populated with vegetation using predefined land type material sets and the computed terrain attributes.



Features Summary:

* Realistic looking terrain with high detail
* Unlimited visibility, detail ranging from thousands of kilometers down to centimeters
* Real time atmospheric rendering
* Rendering of vast dense forests
* Seamless transition from space down to the planet surface
* Adaptive LOD with continuous transitions. Elevation data are preprocessed using special wavelet compression, the required level of detail is extracted effectively on the fly
* Partitioned compressed dataset can be downloaded progressively over the web
* Fractal refinement mimicking the natural processes (erosion, rocks, overhangs)
* Procedural texture generator combining mathematical models and climatic data
* Bitmap overlays for specific areas
* Vector data - roads, rivers, land class polygons

* Dynamic shadows
* Fully asynchronous multi-threaded design able to utilize all available CPU cores
* Terrain and fractal algorithms runing completely on the GPU
* Stable frame rate system
* Supports arbitrary and varying resolution of elevation datasets, refined to centimeter resolution by fractal algorithms
* Embedded web browser allowing for direct web service integration
* Supports COLLADA 3D model file format
* Integrates a Flight Dynamics Model library for high fidelity simulation of aircraft, rockets
* Global physics engine for simulation of vehicle physics and collision detection






More info in:

http://www.outerra.com/wgallery.html
http://www.outerra.com/wfeatures.html
http://www.outerra.com/forum/

Greetings