voxel game

[WILL]

thanks, I'd say Prison Architect rather than Minecraft

Ironically I have not see too much of Introversion's latest game other than a handful of screenshots and a small article on it. I have read tons of tweets about it though. (I follow them on Twitter.) I plan to check out that game sometime. Don't worry take away all the cubes, digging and creating and it's nothing like Minecraft.

I do notice that you didn't refute my claims about a possible in-game Microsoft Office cloning.

Seriously though it's a pretty neat looking concept. I'd love to see more of it once you have it further developed.

So is there a "game" developing out of all of this or are you aiming to leave most of the features unanchored so that it can be easily adapted like a game engine? Seems very sandbox-y. Which isn't such a bad thing. It's worked out rather well for Markus Person.

I think if you go the sandbox routine you'll have to offer a lot of "creative distance" and/or plenty of rewards for the players to achieve over the course of play.

I guess that's what makes me think of Minecraft the most.

[laggyluk]

It's gonna be a game, not an engine. Prison Architect concept is strongly based on Dwarf Fortress, only simpler. Mine is something in between.
Unlike in Dwarf Fortress there will be a goal - terraforming the planet, divided in to missions. Terrain will differ between games, also missions will be randomized to some extent.

[WILL]

Well it sounds cool.

[User137]

I've recently been more and more excited about voxel games, as you can see from some of my creations in starmade
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bs4cj7x1vz98cmf/station1.png

Iu-zwUhBXdGomw5uVxz7QNi7d-w10PWdv9LtaN8AA1Q.jpg

But i also know lots of ways to make game features that don't yet exist. Not going into details about those, but one thing is the "infinite world". Does your voxel engine support that? Or would it run dry on memory after exploring a while. It is difficult to find optimization tips for the subject. Some things i can assume:
- Do not save chunks on disk if no modifications are done to them. They can be regenerated on request.
- Very big octtree and frustum culling should be used. Details on the octtree behavior regards to infinite world might not be simple though. By "infinite" we would mean limit of signed 32-bit integer for single block coordinates, and looping endlessly if possible.
- Generation from noise is the trivial part, although could also be used as optimization. For example 1 noise-map that is on whole chunk level, being quick lookup for knowing whether that chunk will have any blocks at all. For example, if
BlockHasAir:=ChunkNoise+DetailNoise*0.2>-0.3
it was calculated like that, then we could say that BlockHasAir is always false when ChunkNoise < -0.3-0.2.

And actually i'm propably not considering surface-like world at all, but 3D noise that makes unique floating islands and continents in 3 infinite dimensions.

[laggyluk]

infinite world would be nice but I don't actually need that in my game so after some thinking I dropped the idea. I'm a newbie to opengl and 3d in general so making 'perfect' game world would take me forever.

There are lot's of consequences for infinite world approach, besides saving the generated terrain. Ideally space should be divided to chunks with equal side length to not limit the max height of the world. I did go for fixed height (ie. 32x256x32 but can vary across maps) which results in world being sort of 2d grid. Also I don't stream chunks from disk but load them in one go and store generated mesh in separate vbo's. In my 'simulation' game it would take some more effort to update all the stuff like water, atmospehere and ai across that infinite world. So not this time

Btw what I really love about voxels is that it's not that much 'explored' as 'poly' world I mean there's a lot stuff to invent rather than use solutions that have been around for years

there's nice article about voxel world generation: http://accidentalnoise.sourceforge.n...aftworlds.html
I don't use that library but it gives some ideas

[phibermon]

I've recently been more and more excited about voxel games, as you can see from some of my creations in starmade
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bs4cj7x1vz98cmf/station1.png

Iu-zwUhBXdGomw5uVxz7QNi7d-w10PWdv9LtaN8AA1Q.jpg

But i also know lots of ways to make game features that don't yet exist. Not going into details about those, but one thing is the "infinite world". Does your voxel engine support that? Or would it run dry on memory after exploring a while. It is difficult to find optimization tips for the subject. Some things i can assume:
- Do not save chunks on disk if no modifications are done to them. They can be regenerated on request.
- Very big octtree and frustum culling should be used. Details on the octtree behavior regards to infinite world might not be simple though. By "infinite" we would mean limit of signed 32-bit integer for single block coordinates, and looping endlessly if possible.
- Generation from noise is the trivial part, although could also be used as optimization. For example 1 noise-map that is on whole chunk level, being quick lookup for knowing whether that chunk will have any blocks at all. For example, if
BlockHasAir:=ChunkNoise+DetailNoise*0.2>-0.3
it was calculated like that, then we could say that BlockHasAir is always false when ChunkNoise < -0.3-0.2.

And actually i'm propably not considering surface-like world at all, but 3D noise that makes unique floating islands and continents in 3 infinite dimensions.

With the right techniques your limits are beyond that. Available memory as the limit should always be possible. A voxel game using an oct-tree is easy in this respect although you wouldn't use an oct-tree for the entire world, rather just a local frame of reference. Same for rendering say a whole solar system, you wouldn't actually calculate or pass floating values on the outer limits of precision as you'll have a terrible time calculating things for rendering, normals etc Instead you'd translate them all towards precision and perhaps split your rendering into layers, lowering the scale as you get closer to the camera

[laggyluk]

added ambient occlusion and some gameplay but nothing worth showing yet.
window on the left has only AO enabled and right and bottom also SSAO

[hwnd]

How you can render so many cubes with such fps? What culling stuff you use? Using octrees also?
Also i assume you have great new and fast hardware?

[laggyluk]

actually it's running on my 2 years old laptop with 2 video cards, screenshots taken on integrated intel hd3000. what you see is a mesh made of visible cube faces rather than whole cubes. In full screen it gets choopy with ssao enabled but on gf540m it's still ok. and no octrees

[SilverWarior]

What component do you use for representing logics graph in your video?