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Planetary engine that can be used with real elevation data of arbitrary resolution, while being progressively enhanced by fractal algorithms. The fractal algorithms refine and introduce details down to centimeter resolution and can be parametrized by elevation and land class data. A completely random fractal terrain is possible too, or a terrain can be sketched in rough resolution with fractal generating the details. Level of detail ranges from thousands of kilometers down to centimeters, with full visibility. The engine is fully asynchronous, majority of the algorithms running on the GPU while the rest is distributed to multiple CPU cores.

Post news Report RSS Tatra T813 Truck

Another video of a truck riding on bumpy slopes in Outerra, this time the heavy 8x8 all-terrain Tatra T813 with supercharged engine

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Previous video with Cessna test flight apparently made some good (for most) waves in the flight sim scene. Here comes another video, this time with the Tatra T813 truck, focused on its independent swing suspension exercising on bumpy slopes somewhere in High Tatras mountains (it's not a coincidence, the truck got its name after the mountain range).

Suspension limits and parameters were set only approximately so the behavior may not be precise. But it's normal that an unloaded Tatra truck has its hind wheels in V shape.
Also the dynamically refined terrain has a higher resolution than the mesh used for physics, that may be slightly visible in closeups.

For those who noticed that the terrain looks flat due to the lighting - that problem surfaced up only recently, after we switched to the linear space and the gamma correction somehow breaks the lighting. I don't know why is that, yet, but but since the system is going to be revamped I shall return to it then.

As a technical note, both videos were captured using GPU-based compression of video frames to reduce the bandwidth needed for sustained disk writes, while not imposing a noticeable performance penalty. Since the video frames are being compressed on GPU, GPU->CPU transfers are also smaller what is a good thing as well.
I also made a custom video codec for ffmpeg that can decode these videos so one can recompress the video directly with ffmpeg or any other tool that uses the libavcodec dll. There will be a separate blog entry with more technical description and the code to be usable for others.

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Cahir
Cahir - - 186 comments

Impressive work.

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EddieElNIno
EddieElNIno - - 6 comments

nice

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Silverfisk
Silverfisk - - 1,080 comments

That is looking really awesome!

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taurusaurus
taurusaurus - - 198 comments

I totally agree! For lack of better expression it kicks butt :) Looks fun. I think I could buy a game that offers only this as main content. It would offer many hours fun silly driving and staring at the wheels doing their job :)

Of course... some cute unexpecting animals like bunnies or a deer in the woods would be a nice bonus :>

Whaaat?!

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