So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[Ñuño Martínez]

(...) Would love voxel related stuff. Can do random name generation unit/voxel stuff.

I would like to see something like Ken Silverman's VoxLap engine. I know that nowadays voxel has lost its initial meaning (volumetric picture element) thanks to Minecraft and maybe also Unity and Unreal. I really like that "pixelated" feeling of such engine.

I did a voxlap-style try a lot of time ago in C named VoxRend. I have some success but I avandoned because I messed with maths and I didn't know how to fix it (not long ago I discovered I used different axis and projection for camera, scenary and objects ). I still think I should resume the development (in Pascal, of course) some day.

[Thyandyr]

Voxelwise I'd aim for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnTtiLrV1w / https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob...voxel_render.h

[laggyluk]

I would like to see something like Ken Silverman's VoxLap engine. I know that nowadays voxel has lost its initial meaning (volumetric picture element) thanks to Minecraft and maybe also Unity and Unreal. I really like that "pixelated" feeling of such engine.

I did a voxlap-style try a lot of time ago in C named VoxRend. I have some success but I avandoned because I messed with maths and I didn't know how to fix it (not long ago I discovered I used different axis and projection for camera, scenary and objects ). I still think I should resume the development (in Pascal, of course) some day.

Yeah I meant something like that. There are attempts at this subject from time to time but so far nothing 'successfull' so I suppose it might not be the best idea to try
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClz...x9v66YRza5u_Mg

[phibermon]

I think it's too late to start work on a voxel engine now. The future of 3D hardware is essentially an on-chip voxel engine allowing for real-time ray-tracing. Such hardware is already in development by Intel, Nvidia and AMD.

When such hardware is with us, groups of voxels will be fundamental graphics primatives and the way an engine that makes use of such hardware works, will be quite different from current approaches.

We can expect to see the dawn of such devices in around 2 to 4 years and with them we'll see the next generation of consoles making use of them too.

So spending a few years coming up with the fastest way to handle voxels on hardware poorly suited to the task will be made defunct as all the hard work is swallowed up by the hardware and the low level APIs.

True volumetric assets are much harder to create than traditional polygonal geometry - techniques that project and merge surface textures from inputted meshes to define the properties of internal voxels notwithstanding - there's animation and deformation to content with - which is the current showstopping bottleneck of voxel engines. Hardware will have some form of direct support for such operations.

The days of traditional 3D engines are numbered yes but not as much as the days for the current approaches to voxel engines.

It'll be the death of geo clip mapping due to tessellation hardware all over again.

Traditional engines will have slightly more shelf-life - running on older hardware, requiring far less time spent creating resources and potentially being faster on newer hardware for certain types of games (can't see entire planets made of voxels (with voxels smaller than pixels) being feasible for at least another 5 to 10 years)

[laggyluk]

I think this can take longer, new gfx cards would still have to backwards compatible I suppose. First time hearing about this btw
Soft body physics introduce some unique possibilities (Spintires as example) but then I dont know first thing about it

Anyone has other ideas how this engine could stand out? Or it's not really important?

[AthenaOfDelphi]

This is more like it

Sorry I've not been around the last few days, did a job for a plumber last Monday and they've had work for me for several days running since, along with other customer jobs, the only day I've had off was yesterday when I spent 6 hours in the car with Spirit (my game development partner in crime) and Tia (the dog) going to visit my parents. Was a nightmare journey in the heat.

[SilverWarior]

I think this can take longer, new gfx cards would still have to backwards compatible I suppose. First time hearing about this btw

I don't think this would take much long. Why? Because in order to support hardware accelerated Voxel support all you need is a lot of GPU processing power. So if you take into account that today's GPU's are over ten times more powerful than they were about 10 years ago it is just the matter of time.
I have hard about hardware accelerated Voxel support for the first time about five years ago. At that time you required special hardware with insane price tag for it to work. But based on the computational power of today's GPU's I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are already powerful enough for this.
I believe that such technology just hasn't become main-stream yet. And I dare to say that one of the reasons for this are gaming consoles because their hardware development isn't progressing so quickly as PC hardware is. And the worst thing is that most AAA game developers are primarily focusing on game consoles.

Soft body physics introduce some unique possibilities (Spintires as example) but then I dont know first thing about it

Yes soft body physics do introduce lots of possibilities. This is technology that does interests me a lot since I had idea about general concept of soft body physics about 20 years ago after playing the original (DOS based) Bridge Builder for the first time. But at that time I still didn't know anything about programming.
Any way I forgot about that until I found a game called Rigs of Rods which is entirely based on soft body physics. That rose both sad and joyful feelings in me.
Sad feelings because someone else come up with the same idea than me and implement it in practice Would be nice if I would have done this first.
And as many of you can imagine the reasons for me to feel joyful feelings was because at that time I know that I'm capable of coming up with new and unique ideas. And that is still driving me today when I'm looking and searching for new ways and new ideas.

Anyone has other ideas how this engine could stand out? Or it's not really important?

First we should make it useful for widest audience. And then we could work out on more advanced features that would make it stand out from the others. That is why the idea was to make PGDCE to be modular. So if someone found out that PGDCE does not offer him all the features he desires he could go and create a new module with those features and them perhaps also make that module available for others to use.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Anyone has other ideas how this engine could stand out?

Use Pascal Script as scripting languaje.

[phibermon]

Use Pascal Script as scripting languaje.

I love pascal script too - although I had issues with it in 64bit mode on FPC (possibly only on Linux) a year back. I'm not sure if that's been resolved yet.

DWS (or at least some recent fork) claims better performance and to the best of my knowledge supports the same feature set - however if memory serves they don't test or officially support FPC.

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Just to state :

I think we could learn a lot from BeRo - he's an absolute genius coder with his finger on the pulse. He knows more about DSP and audio synthesis techniques than most of us know about all topics - let alone his work on Vulkan and pretty much every other topic under the sun that leads to at least an effective and modern 3D graphics pipeline.

We'd be wise to make use of his excellent code - for example his multi-threading library contains some excellent lock free primatives (although I have found other such libraries by authors and have not exhaustively compared performance)

He's also provided us with a 3D aware tessellation unit which I've found to be an excellent replacement for the GLU tesselator thus removing the dependency on GLU.

---

As I've stated in other posts I strongly believe that engine and content tools really make an engine stand out while also providing a framework and context in which to develop an engine.

With such a tool, preferably with a modular design, you can test every single part of the engine as you develop it - easily setting up complex tests for specific features and combinations thereof just by loading the scene into the editor.

My engine has a real-time editor that synchronises resources, the scene graph and events across multiple clients allowing for not only collaborative editing but it's also the same mechanism by which games have automatic server/client network support.

It's unit tests, engine content tool and a context for debugging all in one - plus it provides some good old fashioned application development that will be accessible to all skill levels in such a project (IE there's tons of stuff you can define in a todo list ahead of time that can be worked on without having to wait for the engine to reach a certain stage)

For my part in recommendation I believe an approach that is developed in tandem with a real-time 'scene' editor of a similar nature is a great idea.

[Akira13]

Haha yeah, I honestly think BeRo might be the best Pascal coder in the world. Who else would it be? No idea how that guy manages to write such massive yet largely bug-free libraries so quickly...