Monthly Archive: May 2012

Wanted to show off another demo I came across recently and that’s the Outerra Anteworld Alpha demo. “Outerra Engine is a unique 3D engine, a world rendering engine capable to seamlessly render whole planets from space down to the ground level. It can use real world data to render the planets realistically, while it also dynamically refines the data using procedural algorithms to provide high ground-level detail.”

Sounds sweet right? Well they’ve released a demo of their game Anteworld that uses the Outerra engine that includes the following features:

• A complete, real scale planet Earth that can be explored
• Created from real elevation data with resolution 90m where available, 1km resolution for oceans; data are dynamically downloaded as you go
• Further refined by fractal-based procedural techniques down to centimeter-level details
• Vector-based road system that integrates with the procedurally generated terrain
• Ability to place static stock objects and drive provided vehicles

The demo comes with the whole planet Earth that can be explored in a free-camera mode or in a 8-wheeler truck. People who like it and/or want to support us and the development of Outerra engine can buy the alpha release of Anteworld at a discounted price ($15), half the amount for the final release. Doing so will give you access to regularly released alpha/beta updates of the game, together with the final version when it’s done. This is the way Minecraft did it and is my favorite way to release a game – you get teasers and content and you continue to play the game because new content is added that brings you back.

The full game includes also a plane and a helicopter, and basic sandbox tools that allow you to create roads and runways and place stock objects. A model importer and vehicle configurator that will allow creating custom models and vehicles will be coming soon in an update to the game.

The demo contains a few locations around the world (a couple of them were created by our tester Pico). Data for the default location are already included within the installer, the rest of it will be downloaded automatically on demand as you explore the world (note: proxy servers aren’t supported yet for data download). The total size of the data is around 12GB, but normally you’ll download just a fraction of the size, unless you traverse the whole planet surface at a low altitude. The demo also only comes with just a single biome – northern type forests. There are no rivers and lakes implemented yet, and no weather yet, almost all the areas are work in progress.

Check it out

So I came across a game on Reddit’s r/gaming earlier today and it’s literally blown up so some of the sites and links may be a bit slow right now, but they’ll bounce back. It’s a game called SpaceForge which is sort of a cross between Halo and Minecraft made by two people and it’s totally and completely free. Well, the idea is that it will be based around free-to-play and they might offer some sort of in-game currency or items that you can buy. It will be single player and mutli-player.

The creator of the game uploaded a new video of some gameplay to Youtube. Some features of the game demo’d in the video are missing from the current version but they’re hoping to iron out some of the bugs so that it will run better on lower-end machines (currently is a killer and you need a decently powerful rig to run it) and to implement features such as space, etc. Here’s their site and here are their official forums. If either are down it’s the “slashdot effect” that Reddit cast upon them and they’ll be back up again shortly.

If you have trouble playing it on your PC, just give it a little while and there should be some more stable versions coming out soon.