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[Geti]

A voxel engine thing, going to hack together a small island puzzle game in it, I think.



I'm currently rewriting how the map is rendered as I'm not really satisfied with it.

Got a lot of stuff to do for KAG and uni at the moment too, but figured I should stop cluttering other threads and have a place to get more directed feedback. I'm not sure if I want an openGL rendering system or not - it'd probably help performance a lot though, and prevent me wasting time iterating on the renderer.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24585904/Permanent/vox_minor/VoxMinor_B8_0812.rar

You can also share levels I guess (they compress down very,very small, 1/500 ratio on average with rar), but objects aren't saved in there and there's no enemies or anything just yet. Soon!

Gotta fix the fps hit from moving the map around/editing it since I'm hiding it at the moment might make some sort of buffer for it I think. Ideally all the objects will get their own nice "VRAM" to write to for animation rather than the current solution, which involves writing pixels directly to the 3d display

[Pineapple]

 


also, you should look into RLE-compressing your levels. very easy and fast algorithm and you simply can't beat its compression ratio for data like this.

[Eigen]

Sweet! The voxels look a little like the double-wide pixels in the old Sierra AGI games. Pretty neat. Will the game play from this perspective? I hope not, because it's not using 3d to the fullest and looks kind of flat (if you go 3d, might as well show it).

Keep on hacking!

[Geti]

I've looked into a few compression algos, I'll likely RLE it soon enough - I wrote the algo but got lazy right at the end and just used raw data its nicely ordered at the moment so that the huge XY planes of "mostly empty" could be represented as ~262144 0 which is a pretty fantastic compression ratio

As I said, raring it is fantastic, but I dont have access to that

Glad you like it even in its currently ugly state

@Eigen: I'm not sure, you can rotate it around more or less fully now but I kind of want to preserve the ratios to make it easy to read - the issue with that is that the vertical distances are actually really hard to read :/ Considering doing some sort of depth fade on it but that sounds wanky.

[Pineapple]

@Eigen: I'm not sure, you can rotate it around more or less fully now but I kind of want to preserve the ratios to make it easy to read - the issue with that is that the vertical distances are actually really hard to read :/ Considering doing some sort of depth fade on it but that sounds wanky.

maybe try a light distance fog?

[surt]

Outlines maybe? (Don't recall seeing voxels + outlines before)

[SolarLune]

Following because it looks like a different kind of voxel game. Cool graphics!

[andy wolff]

I've said before that this is looking good visually

What kind of puzzles are you thinking about putting in?

[Geti]

@Surt that could be really slick, actually. Gonna need some sort of Z buffering though >_<

@SolarLune cheers the aim is to make actual use of the voxels.

I might have to hassle lexaloffal re: performance tricks as I'm having some trouble reading the map into the display without horrendous lag. I kinda want to pump out a simple game with it before getting too involved with the tech though.

@Andy I'm thinking of having re-use of building materials to get around (constructing bridges or steps) as well as lock/key kinda stuff. I want to produce a small set of items/pickups that can be used for multiple puzzles though, eg a shovel that lets you dig through dirt walls to get a bomb that lets you blast into a bunker - if you use the bomb elsewhere you can't break through that door any more. I think forcing the player to make a decision is a good thing, especially if the game is only so long.

@Madk maybe, I tried it a while ago but I've swapped to 8 bit colours, so I'd have to dither it in most likely. I like the outline idea, since that's how I like to separate elements in pixel art anyway

Might do some more on this tonight, I want to sort out the rendering slowdown one way or another. Compiling in release mode is also likely a good idea for stuff I release to you guys

[poe]

I'm always a fan of what you're doing Geti. This looks great, will be following

[Geti]

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24585904/Permanent/vox_minor/VoxMinor_B10_0812.rar



New Build:
performance improvements, rendering improvements and player placeholder render.

Only had 30 min to work on it but glad it actually runs at reasonable fps while moving now

still thinking how to do the outline without facepunching performance, haha.

[Kurt]

This looks really nice! Will the engine be released when it's done?

[Geti]

Maybe. Its pretty simple and hacky though (read: you may as well write your own voxel engine so you understand why each of the hacks are there )