The New Faster, Leaner Next Generation Flight Simulator SIM-Posium is Now Available for Your Input

[cameni 9]

I do not see any pages there, might not be available from here. But if a texture is "taking up too much memory" for what is actually needed for rendering, it means it either doesn't have mipmaps at all, which is often the case in FSX. But it also means the LOD system was not designed for that scale, because even though smaller mipmap levels take much smaller amount of memory, they also cover a much smaller screen space, and you will be issuing too many draw calls to cover the visible world if the engine won't switch to a coarser level geometry as well.

 

I still can't see what's "too large" on the mipmaps though, I'd understand if you said they were too small wrt screen space. Or you mean the textures (not mipmaps) are too large in memory for given detail level?

[dtmicro 1]

EDIT:

BTW, I didn't know you were from Outerra, somehow I missed that in all the chaos. Sorry bout that. See when you started explaining the product, I didn't realize who you were, that's why I was wondering why someone else wanted to jump in and re-explain the product to me yet again, and that's why I got defensive. Since it is your product, then it makes complete sense why you wanted to explain it to me. Had I realized you were from Outerra, I would have just listened

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You are talking about the texture, and I am talking about the radius that is MIP MAP'd not fitting into the left-over memory. You can fit the original texture + surrounding MIP MAP's, if you reduce the viewable radius or increase the obscured area, or increase the compression level of the MIP MAPs.
 

I don't know exactly how GTA V does that, but it uses a lot of distance blurring much heavier and much sooner than many do, reducing the size of the viewport as it relates to your peripheral vision for the highest res part of the LOD radius.

 

When someone says, the MIP MAPs are TOO large for the memory, it means because the viewing radius was too large (the size of the sum of all of them together within the radius took up too much memory). We don't say the texture doesn't fit, because that is implied that the TEXTURE wouldn't fit in memory in place of the MIP MAP since the Texture is bigger than the lower resolution version of itself.

 

It is the exact same as saying NOT only would the texture not fit, but even the MIP MAP'd version of the texture was still causing an OOM due to the size of the viewing radius. 
 

And yes, you did make a very nice product. I think we have all decided your product could be the BASIS for a killer sim, I'm just saying it would be tough to build it ONLY in that unless we have some ok support for overlaying custom textures that isn't too hard.
 

I've never used your product to create anything, so I really don't know.

[Glynn 405]

 

 

They don't need us?

So Microsoft Flight didn't need us either eh?



Of course they need us.

 

 

Outterra are ultimately aiming for a different market, they do not need the flightsim community.

We may turn out to be helpful for them just as we are for Lockheed Martin but we are not their sole focus, The big money is in the Military training market,

[dtmicro 1]

Right, but it was implied that they (or whomever were to build a new sim) need us if they were to build a flight sim. If they don't build it, then yah they don't need us.

[cameni 9]

Outterra are ultimately aiming for a different market, they do not need the flightsim community.

We may turn out to be helpful for them just as we are for Lockheed Martin but we are not their sole focus, The big money is in the Military training market,

Not that big as you may think, or not that big for an engine provider at the end of the chain. But it's something that provides the necessary funding so we can continue working on the engine, and it's in this regard that (or so I interpreted it) that we are not dependent on one particular market, and not under pressure to rush something (which may be both good or bad).

 

I would not say that we are aiming for a different market. Our primary interest is in simulators and planetary-scale games, and a global combined world simulator is something we always envisaged as one of the most important products. Military training is just something that shares a lot of requirements with general purpose simulators, and which was able to use the engine even in its alpha state.

[dtmicro 1]

Our primary interest is in simulators and planetary-scale games, and a global combined world simulator is something we always envisaged as one of the most important products. Military training is just something that shares a lot of requirements with general purpose simulators, and which was able to use the engine even in its alpha state.

 

It's amazing what you accomplished with a small team, my point was never to say the product was not good enough, only that I had a couple concerns if a SIM were to be developed in it, would it be the way to go such as:

 

Is Outerra mature enough, or will it reach the maturity level to be feature-rich enough to use like a game engine for a sim soon?

(since the product is still in Alpha, I think that was a valid concern by me)

 

Since the procedural generator is part of the engine, are we locked to one game engine?

Could your procedural generator actually be run out-of-process and tied into another engine in real-time, or would that be too much overhead between your generator and another engine?

 

It might be the best fit for a SIM, just don't know given that I think most Flight Sim add-on developers do want the ability to add their own textures using external tools, rather than being constrained by only one method (procedural generation).

 

Now the procedural generation method you've created is quite incredible, but to do REAL high-detailed smaller areas, what would we use if we wanted to change things up beyond the flexibility of your own texturing engine's parameter based procedural generation?

 

If you really just created the whole world with the procedural generation, what would the role of add-on developers be then, or maybe the point is to not have add-ons for the graphics, simply in other areas. I'm not sure if this last idea would work, as we simmers are a bit nutty and we love writing our own add-ons (some of us anyhow), hah.

[HiFlyer 9,361]

Thanks for stopping by Cameni.

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Just 10 minutes of clicking around the various links here proved very interesting.

Never even heard of that one before:

 

http://www.presagis.com/products_services/products/modeling-simulation/free_tools/openflight_api/

 

http://www.presagis.com/resources/video_pop_425x360/7482/14/

 

http://www.presagis.com/products_services/products/modeling-simulation/content_creation/terra_vista/

 

http://www.presagis.com/products_services/products/modeling-simulation/simulation/stage/#features

 

Seems like the amount of suitable "engines" and FlightSim solutions is quite large. Just not for the casual user, but for specialized appilcations built specifically to a purpose.

Is this the competition LM is going up against with P3D?

 

So if I wanted a top-of the-line flightsim, taylored to my specific needs, I could get one - the necessary funds provided. Looks like I could also get one for selling it to the general public without having to develop any code at all (instead of developers one would "only" need graphic artists).

[dtmicro 1]

Some of those are probably meant as video creation software, like accident recreation software or simulation for a particular event, rather than trying to build a game around the engine. They might be somewhat "one-way" when it comes to the control system.
 

However, regardless of those links maybe being more for that purpose, what I was saying earlier is there are tons of game engines that have a compatible interface to enable plug-ins for flight sim type physics and various issues that you face when trying to build a SIM. When I tried to discuss it, everyone immediately said well you have to use Outerra.

 

It may very well be the best option, but it's still in Alpha. I wonder what Outerra's real goal here is, do they want to build a simulator or just sell licenses to a larger company that makes the simulator?

And most game engines have procedural generation capabilities. For instance, there was an add-on actually in Unity where you could procedurally generate thousands of different textures that were based on classification systems, and you could also do this over almost any object. I do not think it would have worked for mountains, for buildings it worked fine, and flat water, pools, yards and flat grass (sometimes). The last time I used Unity (several years ago), the problem was it was limited in the way it managed memory for large levels, you had to use trickery to get around the issue. So I don't think it could handle huge open worlds like a SIM, but I didn't try personally, I just remember reading about that in their forums.

 

OK, so I understand some people might be friends with the Outerra guys in here, and the Outerra guys created a nice product, but I was really trying to understand what else is out there at this day and age.

 

I got ridiculed and "word-parsed", felt like my innards were being examined by a doctor...

[HiFlyer 9,361]

OK, so I understand some people might be friends with the Outerra guys in here, and the Outerra guys created a nice product

 

I was careful to say when I started, that in the end Outerra might not be what we wanted, but that it was worth a slow and careful examination. I actually downloaded the unigine demo (I have all of their public demos) and flew, walked and otherwise examined it for several hours, then privately sent some of my preliminary thoughts/concerns to Stephen B.

 

During the course of the multiple threads on this subject, I've also discussed unreal engine (and posted) videos, as well as discussed Proland and others. In fact my history on this site is full of posts and updates on the ongoing evolution of computer graphics as opposed to what we are using now. Probably one of the few things I didn't mention was terragen, as I had always thought of it as not being real time.

 

Having cordial relations with the Outerra developers means nothing. As I said, they are very open, and anyone can speak to them simply by asking questions at their site. I find this refreshing, as some active developers practically won't tell you their names without a court order!  (exaggeration of course but I think people get the point)

 

In contrast, I have seen the Outerra developers go into detailed explanations including coding examples regarding their engine to literally anyone who stops by to ask. Even just one time posters! I've even seem them assisting in detail, people working on thier own, similar engines. Thats a huge breath of fresh air.

 

Its just a shame they don't post here more often, but I can understand their reasoning.

[mgh 89]

If you really just created the whole world with the procedural generation, what would the role of add-on developers be then, or maybe the point is to not have add-ons for the graphics, simply in other areas. I'm not sure if this last idea would work, as we simmers are a bit nutty and we love writing our own add-ons (some of us anyhow), hah.

 

I posted in another thread about Outerra more than year a ago. . This shows an inbound flight over central London at 2500ft on a western approach to Heathrow, There's nothing other than waving grass as far the eye as the eye can see.

 

Has there there been any change and how will London and its airports be modelled procedurally?

 

I  can't  now reload Outerra to my laptop becauset I haven't got the apprrpriate OpenGL driver - the only application that needs it!

 

 

[HiFlyer 9,361]

I posted in another thread about Outerra more than year a ago. . This shows an inbound flight over central London at 2500ft on a western approach to Heathrow, There's nothing other than waving grass as far the eye as the eye can see.

 

Has there there been any change and how will London and its airports be modelled procedurally?

 

I  can't  now reload Outerra to my laptop becauset I haven't got the apprrpriate OpenGL driver - the only application that needs it!

 

Its a fair question, I think. You pointed out a legitimate issue, but its also something being actively worked on. As a procedural world, Outerra is very information dependent. As that information becomes more complete, so does outerra. Just last week, the developers were discussing some detailed forestry information, including species, that were about to become part of the program. In this way, I suspect things will be a bit Like X-plane. As the Osm and other datasets are refined, you will see an ever more complete and accurate representation of the earth.

 

It also depends on your settings, a bit. Here is the london area now. As for cities, again look to X-plane and osm. Just recently (within the last two weeks) the developers reported promising results from incorporating the Osm database into the program. Perhaps slow and steady, wins the race.

 

London now.

 

An area in France modified by an enthusiastic user, using the current tools. One wonders what the professionals might do.

 

Hopefully Cameni will provide us more details. Meanwhile, here are some buildings just recently (within the last two weeks) donated to Outerra by an x-plane scenery designer, covering specifically Talkeetna, Alaska. 

 

Finally, my own (over self promoted!)  video showing the possibilities.

[n4gix 4,947]

I also posted the GTA links because there will be new visitors to this thread who may wish to see how GTA's engine looks in terms of scenery, crash modelling and fun / casual flying, especially since 'world' simulation is now apparently on the cards for this project...

A TBM-700? Yeah right. Pull my other leg, please! The panel looks nothing at all like a TBM-700...

 

Most comical however was the Airbus GPWS!

 

"Retard. Retard." Seriously???

[HiFlyer 9,361]

I dont want to get too detailed into Outerra, as this discussion has been more general. I just wanted to remind people, since it felt like we were losing heart a bit, that there is a dark-horse candidate, sitting right outside the door.

[mgh 89]

Should the New Faster, Leaner Next Generation Flight Simulator SIM-Posium put its money onto  this dark horse - assuming it has any?