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[Toma]

Also, watch this older video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ou65tURHw&feature=youtu.be

What is this you ask?

3D planetary engine for seamless planet rendering from space down to the surface. Can use arbitrary resolution of elevation data, refining it to centimeter resolution using fractal algorithms.

Unlimited visibility, progressive download of data, procedural content generation.

Integrated vehicle and aircraft physics engines. Embedded web browser for web service integration and more.

Current Alpha price: 15$
Download link (FREE DEMO): http://outerra.com/

Important demo restrictions:
- Only car as vehicle
- Not being able to add objects to the world

Impressions:
And they show off and sell their engine using their own project Anteworld, which is Earth. In this engine tech demo, you can walk, fly, swim around the earth and it looks quite amazing at times too. There are some technical limitations (like all trees are 2D textures atm), but god damn. This thing serves pretty nicely to satisfy my noob flight "simulator" cravings. Its a sandbox, and not a game yet, although there are plans to expand on this engine later. Btw, yesterday I spent 10 minutes watching a car falling down a mountain, which was surprisingly soothing.
They currently have about 2-3 updates a month, just so you get an idea what they are doing currently:

- many performance enhancements:
- reworked object rendering pipeline: much faster, a better lighting model, culling on all objects including static, LOD support
- optimizations in terrain rendering, mainly apparent on ATI cards (+20% on 4850, +10% 6850)
integrated importer and vehicle physic scripting
geotagged screenshots, can be also used to jump into the GPS embedded in photos
huge amount of fixes

Link to the forum thread with updates: http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1402.0

This demo might finally get me to try my hand at 3D moddelling tbh. I'd love to see a small GAF community building a small town or just posting awesome screenshots as well We had a thread about this project already before , but I really think this deserves some more attention. And considering they still update regularly, maybe it will remind others that saw this project a while ago when there wasnt a demo yet?

Anyhow, since they are more convincing than I am, here a few more screenshots:

Oh and yeah, the one from the header:

 

[Sethos]

Posted this in the GIF thread, guess it's also suitable here.

 

[Toma]

Posted this in the GIF thread, guess it's also suitable here.

I swear I know every nook and cranny of that runway by heart now. I zoomed out of that area so many times last week, haha.

Thanks for posting I was thinking of how to create a gif or nice looking and short zooming video, and bam there you pop up. Much appreciated.

 

[JLuke2600]

Perhaps it's becoming a bit cliche to say so, but I really want to fly around in this with Oculus Rift.

 

[Sethos]

Yeah, it's so awesome to just float around checking out everything. What this engine does truly is beautiful. My heart almost skips a bit thinking of an actual full fledged game based on this technology.

 

[Toma]

Perhaps it's becoming a bit cliche to say so, but I really want to fly around in this with Oculus Rift.

You are in luck my friend. They have a devkit and work on supporting Oculus Rift:
http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1209.0

 

[Haunted]

Posted this in the GIF thread, guess it's also suitable here.

super impressive.

 

[Dance Inferno]

The important question here is can I shoot/stab anything in the game? I am a gamer, you see, and I need gratuitous violence and sex in my interactive experiences.

 

[Slayer-33]

Posted this in the GIF thread, guess it's also suitable here.

[edit] awesome tech look at dat grass

 

[Toma]

The important question here is can I shoot/stab anything in the game? I am a gamer, you see, and I need gratuitous violence and sex in my interactive experiences.

You can stab the earth. With your car. From Space.

 

[Angelus Errare]

Mass Effect planet exploration...for real!

 

[Shadybiz]

The important question here is can I shoot/stab anything in the game? I am a gamer, you see, and I need gratuitous violence and sex in my interactive experiences.

I am concerned about what kind of killstreaks it has.

 

[Toma]

[edit] awesome tech look at dat grass

The water looks pretty impressive too, take a look at the video linked in the OP below the banner.

... or simply download the demo.

 

[IceDoesntHelp]

Its been updated? Oh jeez, its been a year since I last used it...or so. Nice to see snow now!

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

Wow look so good but what kind of monster PC do I need to run this...

Recommended:
Nvidia 460GTX or better, ATI 6850 or better
1GB GPU memory

 

[Toma]

Its been updated? Oh jeez, its been a year since I last used it...or so. Nice to see snow now!

Yeah, the development picked up quite a bit last year, this is the changelog thread for all the things they added and fixed this year alone:
http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?topic=1402.0

 

[Wok]

Current Alpha price: 15$

I barely think this game could really exist. Anyway, where could I buy it?

Can use arbitrary resolution of elevation data, refining it to centimeter resolution using fractal algorithms.

Or it would not run on my PC. Or there would just be deserts all over the planet, no city, nothing.

Recommended:
Nvidia 460GTX or better, ATI 6850 or better
1GB GPU memory

Hum... At least, the devs are honest.

 

[Toma]

I barely think this game could really exist. Anyway, where could I buy it?



Or it would not run on my PC. Or there would just be deserts all over the planet, no city, nothing.

You download the tech demo (200mb), install the thing and then it takes you to the payment site/store thing from within the game after you created an account. No clue why the account creation/purchase cant be done from the website though.

You should try the demo thing. It even runs on my laptop (Nvidia 555M). Not running it on the highest settings of course, but its playable.

 

[Toma]

An ocean picture:

Snowiverse:

 

[djplaeskool]

Very awesome.

Now I'm imagining what Outerra + Universe Sandbox would equal...

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

Hum... At least, the devs are honest.

Those are recommended specs, these are the minimum which seems more than acceptable:

The minimum requirements are:
Nvidia 8800GT or better, ATI 57xx or better with recent AMD/ATI drivers (older ATI series are no longer supported by AMD and their legacy OpenGL drivers are buggy)
512MB GPU memory
a 2-core CPU

 

[Toma]

Something added in the latest patch (a few days ago):A short video showing the effects of changed center of mass position, together with collisions between vehicles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TyRybcicDBY#!

 

[Toma]

Btw, there are a bunch of extra functions/hidden features that arent explained ingame, like press g for the googlemaps integration. If anyone finds a full list of all keybindings, please post it.

And post screenshots!

 

[FACE]

Posted this in the GIF thread, guess it's also suitable here.

*gif*

 

[Atomski]

Damn thats some impressive stuff..

 

[Toma]

Damn thats some impressive stuff..

Yep, and the reason why more People should Support it. its a two man Project (plus Community help). I want to Throw even more money at them if it helps developing faster
Maybe this thread is doing that for me Hope to find some others wanting to support it.

 

[Riposte]

whoa*

 

[Toma]

whoa*

I was too impressed to translate my German interjection into English.
edit: And with that, we surpassed the post number of the old Outerra thread (with posts across 4 months) within 2 hours. GOOD!

 

[SneakyStephan]

This is... wow. Whoa or impressive or anything else said in this thread including anything I say does not do this justice.

You HAVE TO try this demo people

It's surreal... I can't...

You are so used to invisible walls in games..
There's a google maps overlay (which I highly suggest you turn on) the terrain all being there ...

If you turn up the speed of time things get really REALLY trippy.
You get a genuine feeling of the earth spinning in space. The night sky becomes your frame of reference instead of the ground and horizon
I found it deeply unsettling it made me feel really small.

The endless draw distance, the fact that it's based on real world terrain data (no matter if it's only up to 90m accurate), seeing the transition between day and night while you fly around, the overwhelming sense of scale.
I've never seen anything like it.

Idk if anyone remembers the first time they used google maps, for me it was the first thing that ever offered some perspective of the scale of where you live, the size of your country, the size of your village , where it actually is compared to other towns etc that you can't in a million years get from maps or a globe.
This is that but seamlessly.

It doesn't even need buildings or cities or cars, this is awesome.

 

[spuit*11]

Wow, walking around is pretty surreal.

Edit: If you want nightmare fuel, try slowly walking into the ocean to where the sun doesn't shine.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Ok, does this have anything else like MP in the works?

 

[Toma]

Ok, does this have anything else like MP in the works?

Apparently currently physics, see post above and later Oculus Rift implementation. Since its not currently a game, they will probably focus on engine improvements for now.But this engine could be used for a variety of different games. An open world MP racing game? world building sim? RTS? This engine needs to be more popular so other people/devs become more interested to work wih that kind of engine.

 

[Toma]

I should probably try to see whether the devs made a post about the near future development.Would be interested myself.

 

[taoofjord]

Thanks, Toma! This is right up my alley! The world needs more hard sci-fi and space sims!

I also highly recommend the Space Engine

 

[elyetis]

Impressive engine, the demo definitly show big potential.

But an engine is only worth what a game make of it, so let's hope some good dev take interest in it.

 

[taoofjord]

Really enjoyed the demo... I'm sold. The perfect thing to transition to after playing Proteus half a dozen times.

Toma, have you tried Kerbal Space Program? I think you'd flip over it

 

[PjotrStroganov]

Windows 8 is preventing me from running the exe.

Edit: disabling smartscreen fixed it.

 

[sono]

Woah is the perfect word...

 

[Toma]

Impressive engine, the demo definitly show big potential.

But an engine is only worth what a game make of it, so let's hope some good dev take interest in it.

Ehh, some things dont need to be a "game". As someone describes above, this thing is an amazing and gorgeous sandbox that is actually already enjoyable for some people. I enjoyed tinkering around with the time flow, colour palettes and physics shenanigans, while zooming around the world for example.

Not to mention that you can also build and construct buildings and roads to put in there, so its like your own miniature world building sandbox.

 

[Toma]

A few screenshots I just did, post #1:
Gras picture:

Europe:

Playing around with dusk and light fog effects:

Lovely Country view:

Dat stone texture:

 

[Midou]

Something like Star Ocean or Mass Effect with planets generated like this and some kind of content spread out around them would be so fucking legendary.

Will be trying the demo.

 

[SLV]

Off topic, what was that game/engine that had a similar theme, but it featured the ability to seamlessly fly a small space ship in orbit, on the surface etc etc, without any loading whatsoever, much like this but different i guess ?

 

[Toma]

Something like Star Ocean or Mass Effect with planets generated like this and some kind of content spread out around them would be so fucking legendary.

Will be trying the demo.

Yeah definitely. Mass Effect random content would be ace, or generated dungeons all over the world. The engine demo as it is is still a great toy and pretty impressive, though.

 

[Midou]

So what is the difference between the alpha and the demo? Or is the alpha not out yet?

 

[legacyzero]

Subbed! And this is only in Alpha ATM?? Damn.

 

[Fine Ham Abounds]

Man, when it comes to "non-games" (still don't like this phrase), I am a real sucker for unstructured exploration. It may just be a tech demo, but I'm gonna have to fiddle with this.

 

[Enduin]

Off topic, what was that game/engine that had a similar theme, but it featured the ability to seamlessly fly a small space ship in orbit, on the surface etc etc, without any loading whatsoever, much like this but different i guess ?

Infinity: The Quest for Earth. There are a few others as well looking to the same thing. There's one guy with a decent demo of his engine and he was a former programmer of some well known dev. Like most though I don't think he has shown anything in quite some time. The infinity people though I think are looking to do a Kickstarter.


Edit: the other game is Rodina by Brendan Anthony, formerly of Bethesda. Actually had quite a few new vids including one from two weeks ago.

 

[Toma]

So what is the difference between the alpha and the demo? Or is the alpha not out yet?

The alpha is the demo without a few restrictions, like not being able to build roads and buildings or to use other vehicles. The demo is the currently up to date version of the alpha with these restrictions.

Infinity: The Quest for Earth. There are a few others as well looking to the same thing. There's one guy with a decent demo of his engine and he was a former programmer of some well known dev. Like most though I don't think he has shown anything in quite some time. The infinity people though I think are looking to do a Kickstarter.

Yeah, this is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrcEUO7TC28

 

[exmachina64]

Of course this crashes immediately on start for me.

 

[Toma]

Of course this crashes immediately on start for me.

Havent had a single crash yet, but the developers were SUPER fast when I contacted them in the forum about an issue I had. Them answering me THIS fast was actually the reason why I decided to gave them the 15$.

Here is the link to the support part:
http://www.outerra.com/forum/index.php?board=14.0