Early vehicle physics test

First test of vehicle physics in the engine. Camera isn't yet attached to the vehicle so I had to chase it, without much success I admit.
Also it's really easy to lose sight of the truck in the big world.

Collada Importer

The Collada importer is in beta stage, so here are some first screens with new Cessna model and Gaz 66 truck .. more

Horizontal Displacement

The two-dimensional slope values allow for better horizontal displacement effect on the generated terrain, because now it's possible to make the rock bulge from the hill slope in the right direction. In the previous version only the absolute slope value was known, and the fractals extruded the mesh independently in two orthogonal directions, and of course that did not always look good .. more

Chromium & Google Maps

Another short video showing the embedded Chromium browser and Google Maps that is synchronized to engine camera.

A short flight sim video

It's been one year since we released the first videos from Outerra engine. So it's about time to release another short one.

Logarithmic Z-Buffer

A novel method for dealing with huge depth ranges in planetary rendering, providing all the resolution one needs .. more

Roads

Added support for vector data which is currently used for simple roads, later it will be used also for rivers and similar stuff. The points are interpolated using Catmull-Rom spline, and the generated path is baked into tile's material map with specific artifical material .. more

Horizontal displacement

Horizontal fractal terrain displacement for better looking rocks. Amount of displacement varies with global slope - areas in flat regions are shifted minimally, but sloped parts that are also treated as rock are displaced a lot .. more

Chromium browser integrated into the engine

Chromium browser integrated into the engine, allowing for things like tying Google Maps to engine camera .. more

Procedural terrain algorithm visualization

When I tried to visualize resolution of elevation dataset we are currently using, it occurred to me it would be a good idea to visualize also the various steps and enhancements to the procedural refinement algorithm. These more or less show also how the algorithm evolved .. more. There's also an interactive viewer

Detail texturing

Playing with detail texturing. First creating detail material map for each tile, computed from terrain data - elevation, slope and curvature, using two additional fractal channels for mixing.
The algorithm first computes slope, if it's steeper than some defined angle of repose it's considered to be a rock .. more

Atmospheric scattering

Realtime atmospheric scattering computation .. more

Trees

We've added some simple, crude billboard trees into the terrain. These are generated in fragment shader after the tile elevation map is computed. There can be one tree in roughly each 2x2 meter square; whether there actually is one is determined by an ecotype probability equation that takes into account elevation, slope and curvature of the terrain. There's currently just a testing one, producing a single type of tree. Everything is computed in shaders, billboards are created using render-to-vbo technique .. more

Intro

Comparison of actual mountain described by elevation data, and a rock that is generated by the fractal refinement algorithm. The rock is roughly 4 meters wide

Earlier screenshots without atmosphere. Approaching Earth, heading towards Central Europe

Fractal refinement starts to show up. Original elevation data have resolution ~152 meters