Rendering the surface of earth/planets/moons

crim3d

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Hi,
I once read a post from Martin at the old forum that orbiter won't render planets surface till he finds an efficient of doing so. I've just discovered this: http://outerra.com/
Maybe something like this could be the future of surface rendering in simulations or even games.

EDIT: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qHi_duhNJo"]YouTube - outerra planetary engine[/ame]
 
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The Aviator

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I think this is the dream of a lot of orbiteers! (Me one of them) :speakcool:
 
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the.punk

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Yes I always wondered about something like that in orbiter.
 

Hartmann

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Yes, it´s very nice , but orbiter is not a normal simulator, it have a lot of planets and moons at the same time, so perhaps a external engine adaptation could be very difficult.

it´s not the same but meshland is a good solution until the release of the next versions of orbiter, with a separate graphics engine .
 

Artlav

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Looks nice.
I think i can get Orulex/OGLA to comparable level...
So far it's only as good as this:
 

The Aviator

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What's this Spaceway? It's awesome! It seems something merging Celestia and Orbiter with Orulex and OGLA Client... So far, it seems something extremely revolutionary.
 

crim3d

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Great Artlav! That's right what we are talking about. The exploration of worlds would be a big bonus to undertake a space travel.

I wonder why it's not already used in nowadays games and sims. This detail scalability would rise the bar in graphical detail without rising the ammount of data needed. Doing everything by hand like is done now would end up with bluray disks full of geometry and textures and 10 years of development for each game.
 

Artlav

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What's this Spaceway?
It's a space simulator i've been working on. At first, before i found Orbiter, it was a gravity simulator, then it burst towards being an Orbiter clone with black jack and hookers, far from reaching this goal it gone stagnant for a few years, and finally reanimated as a flyable, totally procedurally generated universe simulator based on OGLAClient engine around not so long ago.

There is no specific development plans or release dates, but something on it can be found here:
http://orbides.1gb.ru/planeter-gal.php

And the planet generator was adapted for Orbiter, here:
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=7205

I wonder why it's not already used in nowadays games and sims. This detail scalability would rise the bar in graphical detail without rising the ammount of data needed. Doing everything by hand like is done now would end up with bluray disks full of geometry and textures and 10 years of development for each game.
Complexity vs sell-it-quick, i guess.
You can compress a vast and varied gaming universe in a floppy disk-sized (1.44Mb) program, but why would anyone bother to do it? You need to fill all these DVD's and multi-Tb hard drives with something.

I don't really know why conceptual compression is so little-used (but i can always speculate).

Pffft. Only as good as that?! :lol:
Aim a mile above the Moon, or you'll never get off the ground. :)
 

cjp

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It looks like the Outerra people have been working hard. I was amazed by the following video, especially when comparing it to the first post in this thread:

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVjCetERjN8"]YouTube- Cessna Test Flight in Outerra[/nomedia]

The website mentions that the terrain generation is done on the GPU. I don't think that real-time CPU terrain generators will ever be this good, unless we'll have computers with hundreds of CPU cores in the future.

Would it be possible to combine GPU-based generators with a plug-in architecture like libProcTer? Maybe by allowing plug-ins to use things like OpenCL? Are modern GPUs sufficiently multitasking to do simultaneously Direct3D / OpenGL tasks for the rendering subsystem, and computational tasks for the terrain generator?

A possible disadvantage of a terrain generator framework that is CPU-based, is that even when plug-ins use the GPU, the terrain data needs to be continuously transferred between GPU and CPU. If it turns out that using the GPU in libProcTer is feasible, then I'll consider making the terrain map data type customizable, so that on some platforms it can be replaced by a handle to GPU-based data sets, instead of data sets in main memory.

PS.
How can I make a youtube video embedded? All I manage to get is a link.
 
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