Más que un videojuego es un motor gráfico, me ha parecido muy interesante y con mucho potencial eso de plantearlo desde los fractales, fusilo el artículo desde lockonfiles:
Outerra is a new 3D Game engine - with many possible applications, we sent a few questions to Brano Kemen, to explain what it can do :
Can you tell us a bit about you and your team and your plans ?
For about three years it was basically just a hobby, but as its potential became gradually more and more evident, we decided to fully focus on its development. We are now working in parallel on the engine and on a game that will showcase it.
Our plans may change, but there is a serious push in the direction of a Flight Simulator, but as a small team we have to play it safe, so the aim is currently a game that will demonstrate the engine's potential and secure us some additional income channels to enable us then to take on a more ambitious games.
We are two programmers that decided to start a project, but there are others cooperating with us already - so as needed, we can expand our team in the future.
What is that you are trying to achieve with Outerra - in which way it is different form FSX or other sims ?
Outerra is a special game engine for future games that would use whole planets or need huge terrain areas.
I have been toying with terrain rendering for quite some time before we started on this engine, and my goal always was to have all the detail required for a ground based game, while also having the maximum possible visibility. As a result the engine can render a planet from space and zoom seamlessly down to the surface.
Outerra is not a simulator in itself, but a graphic engine that can be used to make one. In the demo we integrated it with JSBSim flight dynamics engine that models the movement and forces of aircraft, and with Bullet physics engine used to handle the ground vehicle physics.
The essence of Outerra is its terrain rendering system. The important difference between it and the 3D engines of the simulators you mentioned is the way how it uses fractals for data refinement. Raster datasets have a finite resolution and if one used a high resolution data it would take enormous space ant still it will not be sufficient for ground level rendering. We took a different approach : datasets are refined by fractal algorithms that try to mimic natural appearance , and there is always a detailed, believable terrain created down to the level required for the scene rendered. Several techniques were developed for this to be possible, many of which are mentioned in the blog.
Of course, it's still a long way to go until we implement all that we planned and until the engine becomes feature complete, but I'm glad that most of the people that saw the videos could already see its potential.
I've noticed that Outerra is appealing mainly to people that dream about a global simulator, where you'd be able to drive with a car or train simulator to an airport, fly a plane to a spaceport and so on. That's the ultimate dream of many, and I'd say that with Outerra that dream really appears possible for the first time. It is also our ultimate goal. We will be also doing Moon and Mars or any planet for which there are some usable data sets, it's actually easier to do that than Earth, so the possibilities can be extended even further.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVjCetERjN8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNw7_lyxPmAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoDOPFIiesghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEqIFG2tO88&feature=relatedSalu2!!!!
