Outerra shows off Lukla Airport and Himalayas

[Baber20]

amazing

[djt]

amazing

Yes it is.

I've been following the development of this game engine since late last year and it is out standing to say the least.

For those who would like to “self educate” the Outerra developers are regularly available in their forum to answer questions and give out technical info about the game engine.

http://outerra.com/wgallery.html

http://outerra.com/forum/

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[AnonymousUser68]

Outerra looks good but X-plane still is not looking threatened.

[MatthewS]

Outerra looks good but X-plane still is not looking threatened.

At the moment maybe,  but it wont take the Outerra team long to import OpenStreetMap data just like what's happening with XP10.

IMHO the scenery engine in Outerra is very far ahead of XP (or even FSX).

[Jack Skieczius]

This Outerra thing is very bitter sweet.

the fact it looks great and has potential just blows me away, but the fact that we may never see anything like that in x-plane just makes me cry.

[Paraffin]

At the moment maybe,   but it wont take the Outerra team long to import OpenStreetMap data just like what's happening with XP10.

IMHO the scenery engine in Outerra is very far ahead of XP (or even FSX).

I agree. It's the fine-grain vertical detail on the ground, like those eroded berms at the end of the runway, or the dirt roads and bumpy ground with the truck on their demo gallery. X-Plane and anything from MS like "Flight" will be taking the next step forward when they can do this kind of surface modeling, instead of sticking a photo on large flat surfaces that only look good at altitude.

People who only fly airliners won't care about it. But man, this would revolutionize the experience of bush flying in the simulator.

[MatthewS]

People who only fly airliners won't care about it. But man, this would revolutionize the experience of bush flying in the simulator.

Airliner pilots will still appreciate this high level of ground detail at airports!   

Also, Outerra seems capable of visibility of many hundreds of NM, unlike XP9 which is limited to its 25NM "tunnel vision".  At altitude Outerra promises to be very convincing, I have no doubt that the Outerra guys will be able to add very realistic weather modelling too.  Can you imagine flying at FL3300 and seeing a cold front approaching from 150nm away?  Outerra promises to be just as impressive with its atmospheric modelling as it already is with its terrain modelling.

[AnonymousUser68]

Outerra is a graphics engine and so, yes it looks realistic but you have to render it yourself. The flight dynamics don't look very realistic and I don't like the textures. That was the best of Outerra, its like showing FSX with Captain sim aircraft and Kai Tak by Fly Tampa with the realistic ground textures and then us going and assuming the whole FSX world is like that. I will tell you know that not every airport in FSX has 7 cm ground textures. I think its crazy to believe that the whole Outerra world is that good.

Andy

[MatthewS]

I think its crazy to believe that the whole Outerra world is that good.

Wrong!  The whole Outerra worlds IS that good!  Go visit their site/forums/blog to read/see why its so.

http://outerra.com/

http://outerra.blogspot.com/

[Ben Russell]

Shows a lot of promise but reminds me far too much of this:

The other thing is that in Outerra the whole world seems to be pine trees and flat grass.

[Paraffin]

MatthewS, I've heard somewhere that we may get longer-range scenery loads in v10. I sure hope so. I live in the Puget Sound area of Washington state, and Mt. Rainier is a prominent landmark at 50+ miles on a clear day. You really can't miss it. But it's practically invisible in X-Plane. By the time you get close enough for it to load in, you're already on the flanks of the mountain and it doesn't have that signature look. Same thing for any other prominent, solitary mountains (typically, volcanoes) like Popocateptl outside Mexico City.

I know it takes more RAM and probably GPU power to load things at greater distances. I've wondered if it wouldn't be possible to just tag certain prominent features and have just that part of a surrounding tile load early, but I don't know if it could be done procedurally. Otherwise it would be a lot of hand tweaking. At any rate, it sounds like we'll probably get a brute-force approach that just takes advantage of increasing computer horsepower to do this.

The other thing is that in Outerra the whole world seems to be pine trees and flat grass.

Yeah, I'd like to see how they'll handle things like desert sand dunes, rainforest canopy, African savanna, or mixed hardwood forests in the eastern USA. Conifers are easy, because they're aren't that many different types and they look similar unless you get close. Try modeling a realistic-lookng rainforest and I'll know how good your engine really is. I want to do landings like this:

Getting even close to that feel right now, means hand-placing a ton of individual tree models that kills the frame rate. Procedural generation might do it, but I haven't seen anyone try it yet.

Water textures are another missing feature, and I'd be interested to see how Outerra handles that. With current-generation scenery in flight sims, areas with clear water like the Caribbean and South Pacific don't look right, unless someone is hand-placing shallow water colors. I bought the RealScenery set for South Florida, but I avoid flying over one of my favorite areas in real life -- the Florida Keys -- because the water color is so ugly with the default X-Plane rendering.

[Lukasz]

I want to do landings like this:

Listen to the engine, watch the nose. A perfect example, that power controls altitude and pitch controls airspeed

For me the Outerra engine looks too much sweet and synthetic, also somehow repetitive. It looks like an ideal world, a kind of matrix, not like a rendition of our world. Not to say it isn't pretty, but it's the same kind of prettiness like in a Barbie doll. Surely it's an interesting way to generate terrain and I'd say it has some future ahead, but also it needs more work to make world more believable and not only stunning and pretty.

[MatthewS]

You guys are 'nit picking'.

That video is presenting progress to date, Outerra is not finished.   Naturally they need to add extra textures, tree models, rivers/lakes, more accurate land classes, weather modelling etc.

According to the devs Outerra is running Open GL and using "compute shaders".  That means it leaves a lot of CPU power for modelling things such as flight dynamics, aircraft systems, ATC and so on.  Its designed to be very plug-in friendly, I believe that even the flight modelling (which is currently using JBSIM) can be replaced with other flight modelling plug-ins.

Outerra as a base platform would seem to be far more capable graphically than anything XP or FSX is capable of! Of course we have not seen XP10 yet (or for that matter the upcoming Microsoft Flight).

I really hope XP10 ups the 25NM visibility limit.  For a flightsim 25NM is very "last decade".

[Lukasz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visibility

"In extremely clean air in Arctic or mountainous areas, the visibility can be up to 70 kilometres (43 mi) to 100 kilometres (62 mi). However, visibility is often reduced somewhat by air pollution and high humidity." Correct me if I'm wrong, but X-Plane's visibility limit is actually in statute miles, not nautical. So the above figures can be compared straight away.

I remember Austin has adressed the "visibility problem" in one of his adventures, with photos taken from his plane, to prove his point of view, so to speak Because of various factors, some mentioned above, the visibility (as seen from a plane) is not that great, as many would like to think - at least it's not always that great. So, while the maximum of 25mi is easier on the hardware, it's not that totally "unrealistic".

On the other hand, in real life in right conditions, I'm able to see objects like mountains from about 100km/62mi away and often I wish X-Plane had more "view distance". Hopping from island to island visually, without modern navigation instruments, is a pain. The same goes for dead reckoning. Not that many people would use it anyway, but there always has to be one outsider So yes, we could use a little more of maximum visibility, at least from time to time.

[Paraffin]

Listen to the engine, watch the nose. A perfect example, that power controls altitude and pitch controls airspeed

Heh, yeah. I spent a few years in the passenger seat as an aerial photographer flying into real-world airstrips in the tropics just like that, where tree canopy or hills on a one-way approach meant the pilot had to drop quickly to avoid an overrun. Here's another clip where the pilot does a forward slip plus the power/pitch thing to drop over hill and trees. Look for the plane shadow over the trees to see how close he's cutting it:

I remember Austin has adressed the "visibility problem" in one of his adventures, with photos taken from his plane, to prove his point of view, so to speak Because of various factors, some mentioned above, the visibility (as seen from a plane) is not that great, as many would like to think - at least it's not always that great. So, while the maximum of 25mi is easier on the hardware, it's not that totally "unrealistic".

Ah, fooey. Doesn't Austin live and mostly fly on the east coast? What does he know about mountains?

From where I'm typing this right now, on a clear day I can see the upper 2/3 of Mt. Rainier through my office window, which is just a few hundred feet above sea level.

Google Earth's ruler tool says the peak of Rainier is 99 miles away from my window. Figure curvature of the Earth plus a 14,000 ft. mountain, about 100 miles... yeah, you should see it. Not to mention Mt. Baker to the north, and the Cascades range to the East, and the peaks of Olympic National Park to the West.

But it's just not there in X-Plane. Visible ranges need to be longer. If not for v10, then at least eventually. Not just for realism, but to establish a "sense of place" in some areas. Puget Sound and the Seattle area just doesn't look right without Rainier dominating the landscape. It's like flying over NYC without seeing the Statue of Liberty, or San Fran without the Golden Gate Bridge. Or to get away from the regional bias: Fuji in Japan, Popo in Mexico, the Matterhorn, etc. If a flight sim is going to show terrain features at all, then it needs to figure out how to show the classic landmark features of a region.

[Lukasz]

Agreed about landmarks. In FS9 I used to fly a lot around Hood River in Oregon. There are several distinctive mountains in that area, visible from many miles away. X-Plane fails to replicate that and the whole landscape experience is somehow limited.