So whatever happened to the whole PGDCE thing?

[laggyluk]

In my case I got side tracked and when came back it was kind of game over already. Also task that I chose (network) wasn't much fun to work on, ended up wrapping up 3rd party library with some higher level logic but then what's the point of network code that is not tightly integrated into the engine? And it was going that way (my lack of knowledge and other devs not considering multiplayer being core engine feature).

If there's going to be another try some time then I think there should be an online road map with general features to implement and detailed task lists people can pick off from. Trello/google docs. Completing small steps gives a feeling of progress and maybe more people would participate.
Of course some big head needs to be able to think things through before such tasks list can be created. Are our heads big enough?

Btw maybe this legendary pascal engine could have some feature others don't have to draw interest? Like built in soft body physics or true voxelness (boxes<>voxels). Of course there is a good reason popular engines share more or less common feature set - probably not enough demand for other stuff

[Thyandyr]

If there's going to be another try some time then I think there should be an online road map with general features to implement and detailed task lists people can pick off from. Trello/google docs. Completing small steps gives a feeling of progress and maybe more people would participate.

This thread is 10 pages long so clearly there is interest. Starting sketching up a roadmap sounds like a great way to start. And instead of listing everything what a perfect engine should have, people could just add what parts they are willing to contribute to and what they wish to see. That way we get easy overview.

I'll start: I have unused domain and webhotel in case hosting is required. Would love voxel related stuff. Can do random name generation unit/voxel stuff.

[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.