dtmicro

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.

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.

Since you have never heard the term of a MIP MAP too large, then I suggest you read the following PDF, Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, Specifically page 494 which I linked to below, because it uses that terminology. https://books.google.com/books?id=OVpsAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA494&lpg=PA494&dq=mip+map+too+large&source=bl&ots=QYKgohn5UU&sig=Ei_XEtjiuTr3AzV2PX-OrMMcyPc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_iB0VZLeMcfloASXz4DYDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=mip%20map%20too%20large&f=false It doesn't mean not enough coarse terrain, that's not what I said. It means it's taking up too much memory given its relative nature to the rest of the graphics in the radius, or that the radius is in danger of consuming too much memory, or that the MIP MAP'd object(s) actually will not fit into the memory that is left over. It seems one technique to commonly help this is by actually gaussian blurring to hide the quality of the MIP MAPs so you can then load the highest LOD in a smaller radius ("closer to the viewer"). I'm not an expert at how that's done by various engines because I've never written a game engine (but yes I have written some gaming stuff), but I see it all the time, especially exaggerated in Console games as it is often used severely in this case (been seeing it happen for years and years), since Consoles generally have lower specs.

No one is talking about rendering the entire world using non Land-Class Terragen to render every detail, and sorry if you think some of my terminology is weird. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hate to disappoint you, but the best results in games we've seen have not been from procedural generation, and GTA V is not really all that procedural, some parts of it are like roads over certain areas, but the majority of custom TEXTURES are land-class type method (if comparing to FSX, repeat textures painted over a mesh). Creating textures procedurally for the whole world and leaving it there, well obviously you are going to EXTEND that. The textures were (Drum roll) based on Photo-Real but also some were rendered over the mesh. They are using exactly the same technique I was discussing before. Just Cause 2 was more procedural, but it was still a mix, but yes that did make Just Cause 2 get boring fast and, even though the graphics were good. And I wouldn't say Outerra in its current state better than Just Cause 2 really (but Outerra has potential as a base). We will see how Just Cause 3 did with the procedural re-pasting of stuff, or if they improved the technique. Yes, you need the add-on developers to be able to enhance scenery of the map without having to use sliders for the adjustments or shaders of an area and instead of creating some type of procedurally generated texturing over teh area (I doubt Sim developers want to do it that way). To try to make it look more like the real thing, you need to use other tools. My terminology is not weird, too large or not enough MIP Maps, really? It means there are NOT enough MIP MAPs in the radius, or in some games that the MIP MAP was too big in size, and it is taking up too much memory and low VAS. It is a big problem in FSX with some developers either not creating the MIP Maps, but even more so the FSX engine not being able to unload some of the textures by blurred MIP Map type things. This is why FSX can actually have sharper images than GTA V in mountains if you are far enough away when using REALLY high res imagery, the MIP MAP and blurring isn't enough in FSX.

The amount of space of course, depends on the detail of the base renders, and whether using landclass like repeat textures vs. fully custom real (instead of PR though, we are now using Terragen ahead of time on top of the Outerra). It's basically the same concept... My problem with Outerra is it will NOT look like the REAL area in real life (it might look somewhat like it), and it will get boring fast just like FSX, it might seem cool for a few minutes, but it will get very repetitive, regardless of how many different ways they can make the equations produce the graphics to look different for different areas. That said, I think it is plenty good to use it as a global base for textures. The main reason the FSX engine is slower to load than something like a GTA V engine is 4 reasons: 1) FSX Caching method and memory style, GTA smaller area 2) FSX MIP MAPs are too large, or people didn't even MIP MAP some things... 3) FSX does not auto-gaussian everything as much as it should 4) There are other things it didn't do as well that are newer on more modern video cards As I noted earlier, if you play GTA V and fly at some distance from their mountains, you will quickly see a GAUSSIAN BLURRING trick kick in to reduce the texture memory load on the Video Card. The reason Rockstar is good at that trick and have mastered it is because they are CONSOLE developers, and on the consoles that trick is required even more so than PC's usually or you'd get crashed... All the big Console developers that have made massive game worlds have used some form of that trick (fog or blurring, or both). Also, for Flying I think it has already been assumed people want DETAILED AREAS, not just one mass global templated equation maker area. Maybe for now they care a little, but it will be common to have 8+ TB drives by the time this PROJECT would be released. Also SSD's will be cheaper, so most will have 1 huge non-SSD drive and a smaller 2TB to 4TB SSD drive by then. Pre-Rendered vs. Procedural On-The-Fly Pre-Rendered content can greatly spice up procedurally generated content. Engines like Outerra type generators are nothing new, it's just that Outerra has done it in a way that is acceptably nicer looking due to following Terragen style renders. We've had procedural fractal generation programs since the 1980's, it's just back then they were mostly almost like a WIRE MESH generator instead of having the added ability to generate textures with similar equations. You can make any Outerra like image with Terragen just as easily by rendering it ahead of time, the advantage of having procedurally generated content is only because it saves hard drive space and can potentially load larger areas faster, so not only can it GENERATE graphics from scratch from equations, but the working of those equations in the Memory Address Space, you can refer to the same address space over and over and over again, or you use mathematics and shaders and warp functions to slightly alter the object and then keep referring to the base object by inheriting it. Yes basic programming concepts do sometimes apply in graphics too. Also some games even way back in the 1990's used to procedurally randomize (only in 2D though) with top-down perspectives a random world to play in, with random mountains (forgot name of the games, been so long ago, would have to think about it).

No matter how good they get at doing the above method and creating content and textures with equations on-the-fly, there will always be a procedurally generated flavor to the images, with pre-renders you can create any flavor without having to make code modifications that add further alteration parameters to the procedural equations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why are you making the same mistake as the other guy did and trying to re-explain what we already went over so many times, it's going in a circle. We know Outerra is a real-time "on-the-fly" procedural terra-generator from the very beginning, and I also stated Terragen would take up too much HD space. This was never in question, never... I am talking about enhancing in the sense of overlaying, not editing the images. That way you don't need as much Terragen rendered content as you would if you used Terragen only, some procedural some rendered. The issue with using Terragen images is they have to be down-sampled and MIP MAP'd, yah well there are tools to do that already, but you do have to set some parameters correctly. So even after that process I know what Terragen and Outtera is and the difference, my rendering experience goes back to the 1980's I've used 3DS Max, Cinema Lightwave (whatever it was), Terragen, Vue 'D Esprit, Maya, Mental Ray, to name a few... I come from the Amiga and C-64 days, heck even before that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- See the issue is with those 2 images I posted above, that is about the limits of how good you can make NAIP 1.2m imagery look. Sure for some places you can get 30cm data or 60cm, but still more on the East Coast for the US than the Western Rockies. You can only make them look SO good, and at some point you just really want to render the darn things instead of using the Photo-Real Scenery to correct them :_) That's why Orbx always releases pure PR scenery in such small batches, the correction time is so drawn out sometimes.

Actually if we can use Outerra to create the world, and then Outerra can help us synchronize and overlay some custom Terragen images into their engine, then I think we have the best of everything. WE start with a procedurally rendered global world, and then use Terragen to enhance it. I actually appreciate the discussion and didn't meant to sound demeaning to anyone at all. No-one knows everything, I was just sharing what I thought I knew about it, which isn't as much as some do. Just my thought. This is an example of my work in the Utah Area, starting from very low-quality 1.2m NAIP images, but restored using tons of advanced imagery tricks in Image Magick and other apps: Desert: http://www.mediafire.com/view/i2evx5t5632e8xl/SceneryFX_VastUtahDesert.jpg# Mountains: http://www.mediafire.com/view/66h3uemsje7keoo/UtahMountains.png# Sorry posted wrong link accidentally... The problem is running it through that process greatly increases the time of the photo correction and blending between tiles where errors exist from color corrected zones. Another issue is that this is 1.2m... Will post a 60cm example... It just takes ME SO SO long to do this as one person, that's all.

It's whomever gets the funding, it's their choice.

Or maybe Orbx is secretly planning to take over the world by implanting a chip in everyone's head that says "just buy one more airport, one more"...

Eventually someone will create a new SIM that surpasses what we have today, no idea how long it will be from now, maybe 2030, maybe next year

It's a lot harder to get crowd funding now than it was when Star Citizen got into it, especially since we aren't making a space game, so you might be right.

That's what a discussion is, it's a back and forth where everyone presents their facts for their side of the arguments. Are you telling me a Presidential debate doesn't end up the same way, No we can't, yes we can, no we can't.... It's impossible not to if you are debating different points of views. Usually in the workplace, the arguments are settled by whomever has the decision power. But here there is no subordinated order of power, so we all end up arguing on the same level of control (which is basically no control in this thing). There is tech that helps assist this process, I don't think anyone is arguing that. I think the argument was more on the basis of which tech to use to assist in the design process. I just do not think you will build a good SIM being all over the place, even big companies that become too diversified end up eating their lunch sometimes.

My knowledge is outdated on gaming engines, so I am not that familiar with the newer ones. Sometimes the problem is the amount of royalties the company wants for you to use their engine (I rememeber reviewing one where the company wanted $5000 down and then 35% of gross sales, not net, but of gross!)... Last I reviewed them a few years back, I compared the Crytek3 engine to the new Unreal engine to the Unity engine. For a small budget, Unity was easier and it still had decent frame rates. I am most familiar with Unity as that is the only one I've really messed with (well besides FSX and some others just casually). Unity however did (at the time) lack some low-level abilities to optimize the engine, but it also had a much smaller cost and less royalties, and a big community. I am not sure where these engines are currently compared to the now 10+ new engines that are also teetering on the mainstream. Would take a while to evaluate them all. The place to go is in a forum that talks about coding in game engines, but not the forum on any particular game engine site (because then you'll always get a biased opinion that this engine is best). There is no best engine actually as everyone has a different "best fit" for a particular purpose. For flying over a mesh and coding a sim, no idea which one would be best. Easiest might still be Unity, but it may have too many road blocks and be too hard to code a sim with (no idea atm).

Fair enough, not sure why I expended all this technical energy into this conversation anyhow... Since it started out as a potential Flight Sim funding project, and ended up, let's make GTA V combined with World of Warcraft on a 10 mil budget with a fractal texture generator across the entire world, and while we are at it, we can just throw a flight sim in the middle for all you simmers OK, my point is made

OK, then you are not mad and just misread my post and lectured me, no bad feelings here and no reason for you to "move on". I do apologize for insulting Outerra, I didn't mean to, I was just trying too hard to get my point across. Yes, procedural generation has always had an issue with variations in textures, that's always been the problem with fractal and procedural generation of things. Yes, Outerra did a pretty good job in not making it look that procedurally generated, but I just do not see a Flight Sim World like that, maybe if you want to use that as the default global base textures, then I can understand. It surely would beat what we have today for default world textures, there is no question about that. That said, I see a Flight Sim World where people create add-ons to make really nice incredible sceneries that look exactly like the real-world, but with ever bit of just a slight bit more POP to them than the real world, yet without the cartoony effect. That is why I like Terragen, just a personal preference really.

Nope, you completely misunderstood my very CLEAR posts my friend, though I will admit I was a little bit flamboyant on how I described Outerra (not intentional however as I was typing a lot of data). I clearly stated directly above your post and above my screenshots the following line, before you started lecturing me: "Outerra will be interesting to see where it goes on how it achieves the different looking textures by procedural generation." Before even that post, I clearly posted the following: "Still it (being Terragen) should look better than trying to make my own fractal based textures that auto-textured the world." What else does an auto-textured world mean? I also stated Terragen would use too much hard-drive space. I could not have been more clear in what I stated, in any form or fashion. You were just looking to lambaste me because I disagreed with you. You either didn't read my posts all the way through, or were so mad about my comments on Outerra that it went right past you.

I completely understood the textures were procedurally generated by fractals and THAT IS WHY I STATED ABOVE VERY CLEARLY THAT the disadvantage to Terragen is the hard drive size vs. fractal procedural based generation. You are still having to make your own textures with procedural generation by altering parameters in order to tweak them to look correct, all rendering apps are like that. You may not draw the textures yourself (who does that anymore), but you are still creating them in some form or fashion with parameters. My point was that Terragen comes with a well refined UI to create these textures to where this isn't as needed. So yes, you are the one that misunderstood my posts and if you re-read above you will see where I said that... Yes, it is troubling that you skipped over my post, told me I don't understand, and become so defensive about it. That was not the first time I read about Outerra, I've read about it many times. I'm also aware of other programs like it. I only just tried the demo the first time, as I said it shows promise, but procedural generation of textures has limitations in the variations you can achieve as well as to try to tweak things to look like the real world. It would be difficult relying purely on math adjustments to get textures to look right, unless the engine were highly refined. It would also not be as add-on friendly. Which is why if I were to start today, I'd be making the textures in Terragen, not until "on-the-fly" procedural generation can impress me as good as Terragen pre-rendered images can. Also, I never said I would rule out Outerra completely, what I said was I would try Terragen first to get better results and image fidelity, obviously I'm going to experiment with various methods. I myself stated someone would need to evaluate the various rendering methods and game engines for about 3 months. I was just playing devil's advocate telling you what I see wrong with "on-the-fly" procedural generations based on fractals.

Outerra will be interesting to see where it goes on how it achieves the different looking textures by procedural generation. I'm not saying it is ruled out if I were part of a dev team, what I'm saying is if I had to choose today, I'd have to try Terragen first, because it's more complete on texture variation and world rendering. Here is what I want my SIM to look like: (ALL GENERATED IN TERRAGEN)

I don't want to make textures, the best textures in the business are made by Terragen and the software is reasonably priced. Why would I want to make my own textures, that is the whole point. Terragen is not a game engine, it is purely a world generator, these guys are trying to be too many things at once. Sorry if the flying in Oblivion wasn't good enough for you Terragen is the gold standard, if the textures and objects can be MIP MAP'd, I'd definitely use Terragen. Now if you just couldn't make the MIP MAP's look good enough from Terragen to get good enough performance, then maybe I can see exploring other options. The big disadvantage to Terragen would be the hard drive size for the entire world, it would be a similar problem to aerial photos (but maybe not quite as bad). Still it should look better than trying to make my own fractal based textures that auto-textured the world. As far as basic flight functionality, mesh, ability to add water masks, that is the easy stuff, most of that stuff is just light coding encapsulating the already given functionality in the game engine. I'm not going to base a new project on a new engine, I'm going to base a new project on a proven engine such as Unity or something else similar. There have already been flight games built with Unity and other similar engines, they already include libraries for it that are likely more refined than something created by a couple devs that have some simulation contracts.

They don't need us? So Microsoft Flight didn't need us either eh? Of course they need us. My first impressions were that on the ground the grass texture was nice and the trees looked good enough, my secondary impression is this is nowhere near a game engine, and this is in its infancy stages. They are lacking texture variations, Terragen already has all that with a full plant system programmed in. Terragen has "Hollywood level" texturing that has been used in countless flights in movies, and just about every other modern movie you can think of, most add-on models made by modders aren't going to cut it IMO. Remember the flying in Oblivion, yes that was done in Terragen. http://planetside.co.uk/galleries/tg-in-film I could myself render a Terragen world and make a fly-by like that at an even much higher quality just by using Terragen, not sure if I could achieve the same FPS as they did it in, but I definitely could do it. If I were to run this project, my first investigation would be to create a small Terragen texture map over a GIS data mesh, and then attempt to load it into Unity. I wouldn't attempt to use Outerra first. Just because a product can support or load a mesh and have a fly-over does not make it anything special at all. Every game engine can do that. Just because it has some basic flight model you can use, also doesn't make it anything special at all, there are all kinds of flyover and custom add-on flight models you can add to game engines.

I'm downloading it now, but to me the screenshots don't look any better than Orbx quality from the air (maybe worse in some cases). I will test it however. Close up the trees look better, but that isn't very consequential to a flight sim. Here we are going for another FSX clone that has fewer features, I picture a world that looks more like Terragen than Outerra. There is so much junk that has to be coded for a real flight sim, not sure how some modders are going to build out a full flight sim, guess if they don't care about a paycheck, anything is possible.

It looks promising, my point though is the same, don't try to create an all-in-one to be a flight sim on a small budget, it's two different products. Who is going to want to drive around endlessly in an open forest? In GTA V, you have guns, missions, clothes, and all kinds of stuff going on that would have to be coded. The actual driving over a landscape isn't even the most tedious part of the game design. There is barely enough budget on a crowd fund to even finish a flight sim, much less add all that other stuff. OK, but the detail isn't at GTA V levels, and what are you driving is one vehicle.

Nope, our PC hardware isn't advanced enough to do all that yet on a global scale, and the coding is way beyond what a small project can do. The problem as I stated above is the amount of custom graphics and varying functionality between different vehicles, and how it would all have to work together, Flight Sims have the unique thing to where the main problem is the graphics and the world and the physics, most other sims have different technical hurdles. The size of the world would be too large, GTA V is a tiny area on a 100+ mil budget, not sure what part of that people cannot understand. Creating a next-gen flight sim isn't creating GTA V. If you tried to make a generated world both a driving game and a flight sim for instance, there wouldn't be enough detail in it or enough good driving physics, you'd have to re-code that too. Every dynamic simmable object you add is going to slow down the game performance as well. The budget wouldn't be there. Just because you can drive around or add a car does not mean all of a sudden people are going to buy a game where you can drive around in a somewhat empty world. You're trying to remake GTA V on a smaller budget as a LARGER world, that's silly. You are not going to build a good flight sim by making a universal world that universally contains multiple types of sims (not on a realistic budget), two different products. I would not rule out Outerra, but if anyone goes to build a flight sim, you still have to keep focus on the sim aspects, even if you build out a nice world first. Otherwise you are trying to create MS Flight version 2.0.

On a crowd funding budget, you'll never create a world that others want to use as an all-in-one product in software that attracts more people just because it is an open world. That is an entirely different project and that it is way beyond crowd funding, now we are talking exorbitant amounts of money. Anytime you try to open up a project to be all things or many things, you increase the level of complexity exponentially. Hence, it is easier to build a train simulator separately then to build a flight sim that also includes a train simulator. This is just an example, I know you were not talking specifically about a train simulator. With all those other "open world" simulations, you are going to have to create super high-res close-up textures that also look geographically correct from a distance. As well as way more rendered models, and the ground models would have to be such high-resolution that it wouldn't be compatible to fly over at high speeds for such a large world. You wouldn't be able to pre-load all those objects in real-time as someone is flying. That is why GTA V is a small map. These two ideas aren't even remotely compatible, and I can see this thing going in so many directions, that if I were in a meeting with you people right now, I'd be speaking very loudly and in your face about the stupidity of this idea from a budgeting standpoint. That is even beyond a GTA V level product. You could possibly add one thing, like a train that goes around the map or some neat things like that, but definitely not as a full simulator (there are already products out there for all that stuff). Now before everyone says, well it could just be this or that, you'll never market a product unless it has a clear identity. The absolute farthest you could divert would be adding the ability to fly rockets to different planets (since we have a terrain generator, this should be possible) and maybe adding combat features. That may interest people, if they can fly to and over an actual mesh of MARS. There could be other ideas in that same general realm of thought, but you can only divert so far off the main purpose with such a small budget and get away with it. Even then the rocket sim idea is going to be a bit of a pain as it will likely increase the budget (depends how good you make it). On the initial 10-20 mil budget, I wouldn't even bother trying to make multiplayer at all at first, I would add the multiplayer later and just leave an API to make it possible. In software you have to stay focused on one thing with a clear goal, trying to create an all-in-one product as a FIRST attempt, that would never work. That is big boy territory and deep water, you need to stay in the shallow pool as a non-existent crowd funded startup.

Not only that GTA V had to build their own game engine (probably 25mil+ right there), and port the code to multiple devices (Xbox 360, Playstation, and PC). They had to write a bunch of C and C++ code. Most games with over 50 million budgets either heavily customized an engine, or built one themselves. The comparison isn't even close to what we were discussing here. So even despite the thousands of animations they did, hundreds of cut scenes, 50+ actors they hired, hundreds of detailed models (cars, planes, helicopters, buildings, houses, grass), tons of explosions, detailed car physics, music licensing, and the 125+ million they spent on marketing, well yah it's not HARD to blow 250+ mil from all that. Almost none of the stuff listed above would even be tackled in a Flight Sim. Sure some basic car models (buy them), vegetation (doesn't have to be perfect close up), some explosions (but you can limit it), etc...