There's some folks called I-Novae trying to do a similar thing, but making a space-fight simulator game on top as well, called Infinity: https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology. I'd be curious to hear a technical comparison. It looks like Outerra focuses more on the planet-side and I-Novae more on the space-side.
If you go deep into their blog to see screenshots from the first versions you'll see just how far this project has come. The amount of work that has gone into it is staggering.
There's also nibbles, of some pretty interesting math and programming problems in there...
It looks beautiful. The demo is only available on Windows tho it seems :/ Does the engine itself work on Linux/Mac/Android/whatever?
Wouldn't be nice some kind of game like KSP with this engine in a MMPORG fashion? I know, keep dreaming :)
Is this project even alive? The last forum posts seem to be about a year old and there doesn't seem to be any development on the OS X / Linux front despite them saying it was right around the corner in 2012.
Jaw-dropping! Now if only someone could pick this up to build a Win/OSX/Linux version of No Man's Sky!!! That would be the ultimate amazement to me...
Wow. That's an impressive demo.
My only comment would be that in the demos with trees give away the fact that it's computer rendered. not really sure what it is about them? (They don't sway? They're too similar? The algorithm is 'showning'?) Any one know what it is I'm noticing?
This is quite impressive! The vehicles and flight simulation suggests that this is being developed for some specific game, but I couldn't find any references on the page. Does anyone know if this is the case, or if the engine is just being developed for more general purpose use?
I would love to see more flight sims produced. When I was a kid, some of the best games out there were flight sims.
But ever since graphics technology caught up enough to represent complex close-up 3D world, land-based games with avatars and close-up action-packed combat have taken over.
Flight sims tended to focus a whole lot more on planning -- you'd often have a mission planner, where you'd plot out your route (and sometimes the mission/route of other aircraft as well), then you get in the plane, taxi, fly for a while, watch out for SAMs, maybe get intercepted by enemy aircraft, find & attack your target(s), then fly home and land. I guess it sounds sort of boring, but part of me wonders what kids these days (OK, I'm old, I know) are missing out on.
It's also worth mentioning the less known Tinman 3D Terrain: https://www.tinman3d.com/. Still in early stage, but really promising.
Those demo planets look they are only few hundred miles in diameter. Is this a hardware limitation or it is simply done here to shorten the demos?
If you like things like this check out SoA: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo_x9FnnXTc
The devs are really smart and pulling together some amazing optimization stuff that you wouldn't really expect.
Do they have 24-hour analytical sun+sky model? I'm obsessed with something like that ever since I came across Hosek-Wilkie model (unfortunately it is dawk+day+dusk only, no night time).
I would highly recommend this for anyone who owns an Oculus Rift.
I wonder what kind of device specs are required to run this kind of simulation properly. Couldn't find any information about this on the site and on the blog.
I like this. I look at this project and see all kinds of potential.
See also Proland, which is open source:
http://proland.imag.fr/
It's a tech demo/research project, which means the code is basically continuously broken, but I did bodge it into workingness on Linux. It's impressive but doesn't quite live up to the videos --- I think they're using features that weren't working in my copy. But it is one that you can actually get your hands on and play with.
Proland is by the same person who did the wonderful Rama animation here, using some of the same procedural generation technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBIQCm54dfY
Although Rama wasn't rednered in realtime.