An Interesting Future for Outerra

[1mikel151 71]

Spent a few hours in the world and an hour or so on the forums. I like the representation of the world. I loaded up at the spot where Bagram airbase (Afghanistan) is in real life and the mountains in Outerra gave a pretty good representation of what i have seen in videos. I then typed in the coords of St. Johns in the Caribbean, very nice, the islands seems spot on with convincing coastlines and i even waded out in the water which was pretty convincing at waist level, I half expected to see fish swimming by, LOL. I really love the detail at ground level, how you can look down at dirt, concrete and grass and see detail. The sense of distance was really great also. Seems when I go somewhere in a vehicle in FSX, I get there way to fast, Outerra takes a bit longer and seems to make more sense. I really hope Bomber can work some magic with the flight models..

 

I was a bit disappointed in performance, probably because this engine is more modern and takes advantage of newer hardware than FSX or P3D. i have a 4 yr old system, which is 64 bit and runs FSX at almost full settings.. I started off with everything full on and it was a little choppy, but after backing sliders down a few notches, it smoothed out nicely, but then again, this is plain earth with no weather or addons, maybe it was the new drivers..

 

I am a bit worried about it going forward after spending some time in the forums. I would hate to see a serious attempt at a new game engine to turn into something like Garry's Mod and the community around it.

 

Really looking forward to some object placing tools, so I can build some scenery, got lots if items and ideas.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

The thing about Outerra is that it uses resources almost completely opposite from FSX, which is CPU driven, whereas Outerra is heavily GPU driven. I started another thread here with how to access some performance and debug tools and it might be informative to take a look at exactly how Outerra is using resources. Its very interesting, especially memory use!

 

In the meantime, start with default settings and work your way up. AA affects things very strongly, and that's where you need a powerful card. Fortunately, you need very little AA for Outerra to look great. I also turned texture quality to minimum, which sounds bad, but minimum in Outerra still stomps FSX maximum into the dirt, and you don't need to see sneaker scuffs at 15,000 feet! 

 

With those settings, I average about 150 fps, and at higher altitudes up to 400 fps.

 

Outerra already has simple placement tools which user Acetone created his Alaska demo area with. Download it here: http://forum.outerra.com/index.php?topic=2855.0

 

As for Garrys mod, The Outerra tech is going to allow a very wide range of usage styles. The trick is to get in and make a strong aviation claim while all options are on the table. Its why I think it would be such a mistake if the community in general decides to just sit back and take a wait and see approach. Be there or be square!

 

 

 

Example framerates.

 

 

 

Pushing some polygons.

[vickyj20 4]

ohhhhh boy.. noting to challenge here..pics are just great

[HiFlyer 9,360]

My first Outerra video, and appropriately its named "Just a test" 

 

Quite boring, really. But beautiful!

 

[vickyj20 4]

no shimmering of water??

[HiFlyer 9,360]

no shimmering of water??

 

Think the sun would have had to be at a lower angle; this was more a test of the built-in video capture for me, which can sometimes cause stutters as it writes to disk while you're flying. I was also experimenting with the effect of maxed graphics settings on video capture.

 

Having that nailed, I can think of doing a more ambitious video.

[LeviCires 0]

no shimmering of water??

Yes, there's shimmering of water, but from higher altitudes it's harder to notice it.

[z06z33 763]

Yes, there's shimmering of water, but from higher altitudes it's harder to notice it.

 

I'm hoping it will eventually replace a program called vehicle simulator which allows you to fly a plane or sail an ocean liner its fun but the graphics are kinda dated.

[vickyj20 4]

Yes, there's shimmering of water, but from higher altitudes it's harder to notice it.

wow this is great, cant wait for this to be used as future fsx.

[DetCord 24]

wow this is great, cant wait for this to be used as future fsx.

 

Too bad it's (Outerra) stuck in a perpetual state of undefined development. Barring a flight sim dev purchasing a license, it'll never progress toward replacng FSX, P3D or XP.

[Baber20 1,438]

Too bad it's (Outerra) stuck in a perpetual state of undefined development. Barring a flight sim dev purchasing a license, it'll never progress toward replacng FSX, P3D or XP.

The engine itself is still a WIP. You don't expect the devs to start working on a Flight Sim with a wip engine. They still have to implement clouds, weather, ssao, lights and other important stuff. Speaking of undefined development, their development timeline is pretty well defined http://outerra.blogspot.ae/2014/02/2013-retrospective-2014-look-ahead.html . Take a closer look at 'Other News'

[DetCord 24]

The engine itself is still a WIP. You don't expect the devs to start working on a Flight Sim with a wip engine. They still have to implement clouds, weather, ssao, lights and other important stuff. Speaking of undefined development, their development timeline is pretty well defined http://outerra.blogspot.ae/2014/02/2013-retrospective-2014-look-ahead.html . Take a closer look at 'Other News'

 

The engine has been in development since 2006, and it's still essentially where it was in 2011 with regards to a development suite for non-commercial applications. Still, my point stands. It would necessitate a studio purchasing a license, a large investiture of capital, and thousands of hours of work by a large team to move Outerra past a Work in Progress Tech Demo and into the realm of flight sim development.

[HiFlyer 9,360]

The engine has been in development since 2006, and it's still essentially where it was in 2011 with regards to a development suite for non-commercial applications. Still, my point stands. It would necessitate a studio purchasing a license, a large investiture of capital, and thousands of hours of work by a large team to move Outerra past a Work in Progress Tech Demo and into the realm of flight sim development.

 

Maybe, and maybe not. For one, I would also point out that according to that line of reasoning, X-plane doesn't exist.  ^_^

 

Hmmm.... come to think of it, neither does Flightgear, which also uses JSBSIM.

 

More important to me is that the most certain way to fail is not to even try.

[z06z33 763]

"We did a lot of demoing and presentations in the past year and got into several projects that now allow us to grow and speed up the development. In addition to working with dedicated development teams on special simulation projects based on Outerra, we will be also expanding our core team here in Bratislava, Slovakia. New people are expected to work mainly on the import tools, server side back-end and on the UI, replacing our programmer's design.

The breadth of the scope of possible Outerra applications is huge, and we are also investigating other possibilities to launch development of other OT-based projects. A hot candidate is a unified simulator platform with the primary initial focus on a flight simulator, as it makes the largest group of inquiries we are getting. This would mean a dedicated development team working closely with the core, and in cooperation with content makers working on scenery, aircraft, simulation cores for flight and other types of vehicles.

In any case, a project of this scale would require a sufficient funding, and so we are currently discussing the development of a prototype usable for launching a Kickstarter funding campaign with several interested developers."

 

​I'd pony up for this kickstarter think if PMDG or Aerosoft became involved!!

[cameni 9]

The engine has been in development since 2006, and it's still essentially where it was in 2011 with regards to a development suite for non-commercial applications. Still, my point stands. It would necessitate a studio purchasing a license, a large investiture of capital, and thousands of hours of work by a large team to move Outerra past a Work in Progress Tech Demo and into the realm of flight sim development.

 

2006 ... that could have been only some predecessor of Outerra, not yet based on real terrain and not using GPUs.

 

Oldest algorithmic roots of Outerra came from my fractal terrain program in 2001. Small scale terrain, very limited and all, but the principles with which it worked proved to be perfectly scalable and usable on future graphic hardware.

 

This was in 2001:

 

It was developed very sporadically; there was an enhanced version in 2004 with 100km visibility, but only in 2008 I started using real world data and moved to GPUs with it.

More info about the past, present and future can be found in new topic: Outerra Roadmap