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[Blackvoxel]

Hi, we want to get feedback on Blackvoxel.

Blackvoxel is a sandbox game based on a voxel engine.

The game is written in C/C++ programming langage using OpenGL 1.1 and running on Linux and Windows operating system. It is actually in Alpha version.

The voxel engine is optimized to run smoothly (fluidly). The univers is big to explore.

The game is based on exploring a totally unknow lost world and progressing using intelligence and technology to overcome obstacles.

Modern methods, tools, automation and programming will be the means to produce and build to advance in the game.

Features:

> Virtualy unlimited World in the 3 dimensions : You can dig or climb for your remaining life
> Make your own user defined voxels with your own high resolution textures : Upto 32767 depends on your graphic card memory.
> New ring zones : Lava rivers, Stick jungle, Mathematic curves, Huge tree forest (1500ft huge trees), Very huges moutains...
> Multithreaded architecture take advantage of multi cores processors to handle some heavy treatments of the game.

Upcoming features:

> Real time chemical reactions between voxel elements.
> Voxels machinery and automation.
> User programables voxels which interact with the environment.
> Electronic logic circuits.
> Controllable vehicles: Car, Plane ....

Visit our website http://www.blackvoxel.com and watch the game video trailer!

To the website you can download a free demo version...

We would appreciate to get general feedback on it.

Blackvoxel Team

[Cheezmeister]

I like the idea. Minecraft-esque with a more modern, abstract aesthetic.

- You're using SDL+GL. Why can't you support MacOS?
- I don't know about optimized. This thing is pulling a 27% CPU load while minimized.
- How the heck do I get at the other voxel types? Or is that supposed to be part of the challenge?

[Blackvoxel]

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

We are very pleased that you like the design of our game.

Yes, technicaly we can support MacOS. And we will be happy to do it in the future. It will depends on success of the game and particular demands from MacOS users.

As you have noticed, the game doesn't stop when minimized and the game logic continue running. It is intentional for this particular game as you will be able to let some creations in the game running and producing resources while doing other activities with your computer.

You can see that for the moment, with a few tweakings and setting reduction, the game is able to run with my small netbook EeePC 1001px with a single core Atom and a very little GMA base graphic chipset. (But that may change in the future because some features will require a lot of computing power. But if possible, I would like trying to keep the possibility to tweak some settings to work with small platforms.). That said, i would appreciate feedback on how the game runs on different platforms and different brands and models of graphics chips.

Obtaining other voxel types will be part of the game adventure. But for the moment, as it is mainly creative and exploration because the game logic is partial in this alpha, so we provide some other means to get them. You can get most of them by using the "k" key to activate the "creation pack", filling your inventory with some of the actual voxel types of the game to make constructions and some efficient tools to dig faster.

The game also support the capability of creating you own user defined voxel types (including transparent materials and colored glasses) upto 32767 depending on your graphic memory. There is a tutorial on the site with a graphic template file and instructions to do and use them in game. All this is detailled in this tutorial: http://www.blackvoxel.com/view.php?node=1253

Blackvoxel Team

[bitMasquerade]

Wow, OpenGL 1.1 is really old school. You've already gotten far enough into this project, but I urge you for your next project to at least go up to 2.0 so you have VBOs (and GLSL for fun). All the online writing about OpenGL is all about 1.x, and its (imo) a bad practice to get stuck in that.

My experience with using OpenGL 1.x: my computer was chugging at a few hundred triangles, and after upgrading to Buffer Objects, was able to handle upwards of a million. I believe this is because sending lots of data across the bus from RAM to the GPU each frame, is very expensive and slow comparative to communication among a single chip. Even the performance of displayLists is peanuts to what you can get with buffer objects. I believe this my be one of the reasons this take up so much CPU (27% while minimized according to Cheezmeister) (its the same sort of thing with Minecraft).

If you want to look into OpenGL 2.x, 3.x, here are some useful resources:

www.khronos.org/files/opengl-quick-reference-card.pdf
The quick reference card for OpenGL 3.2, learn to love it, anything in light blue, avoid like the plague (Im looking at YOU, glBegin!).

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
One of the ONLY decent online resources for modern OpenGL. Unfortunately, modern OpenGL really is a completely different language. At least read the first section titled 'Why Read This Book?' to better understand my hatred towards 1.x

http://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-SuperBible-Comprehensive-Tutorial-Reference/dp/0321712617/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
and, if you want a book, check out this one; The OpenGL SuperBible. It really is one of the few good printed reference materials on modern OpenGL. Avoid the 'OpenGL Programmers Guide' (aka, The Red Book), it has backwards deprecated (as of 3.1, the version they advertise) stuff all over the place (regardless of it's advertisement of the Official Guide to OpenGL 3.0/3.1).

Anyways, thats been my long winded rant and 2 cents worth. Hopefully someone finds it helpful. 

Otherwise looks good, but I fear your game will fall into obscurity for being YAVG (yet another voxel game). IMO, definitely beef up the stuff like chemical reactions, vehicles, whatever will distance it from Minecraft. Although it may be tempting, don't focus on building, Minecraft OWNS that market; make your game unique.

Godspeed, and goodluck 

[Jwosty]

Nice job, looks like this could be a truly awesome game! Just don't make it too much like Minecraft (as bitMasquerade said), or I don't think it could become too popular.

The only criticism I have as of now is that some of the structures are too big -- like the trees -- but it looks like you've nailed the mountains; I've always felt that the Minecraft mountains are far too small.

One more thing: I would have played the demo but I'm running a mac and don't feel like installing wine or anything.

[Blackvoxel]

@bitMasquerade

Thanks a lot for your wise response and your good documentation.

We know the choice we made may sound surprising for you. So let's explain it...

For OpenGL we are fully convinced you are right on the fact it's a good thing to use modern versions of that API. At last,  it's what we thought before programming that game.

Before programming the game, we spend a long time in testing and benching different methods to find the better way to do the job : direct mode, display lists, VBOs, Geometry Instancing and different tricks with these technics. We benched all of them and compared their advantages and caveats.

All methods showed advantages and drawbacks but we were disapointed because none of these was perfect. It seems obvious that GPU and their APIs wasn't designed with voxel rendering in mind.

The problem with VBOs is that they suffer some limitations that are harmful in case of voxel rendering and would have led to some limitations in texturing that would have harmed our engine capabilities. For particular things we wanted to do, it wasn't acceptable.

We found ways to overcome these limitations but at the price of using recent extensions that was just added and our game would have suffered compatibility problems and increase of graphical memory usage. For a multiplateform game, that problem wasn't acceptable either. We have to cope (when possible) not only with users that have high end machines and top graphic cards with updated drivers but also with a large range of machine, outdated drivers, poor drivers and so.

On the other hands, we found a way to get good performances without using VBO and we gained better flexibility and better compatibility.

As you can see, the game achieve good performances even in cases of very high polygon count in the "sea of sticks". With some settings, It can even run on small netbook in which a lot of games does not even start.

For the CPU usage, keep in mind that the display is only one little part of the jobs our game engine have to do. To tell you the thruth, the real pain of a game like that was on the non-display parts because a voxel game can be much more heavy in terms of processing power than vector games. It's where are the real difficulties in writing such type of games.

And also, remember that this is only an Alpha version where the goal is to have a game that runs the more correctly possible on the computers of people. This doesn't prevent us to do more modern codepath in the future if needed for the evolution of the game engine. But even without that, there are remaining optimization margin we can use to get the rendering faster if needed.

For what you say on the risk of being taken for "just another voxel game", you are 100% right on your analysis.

Our goal from the start was doing a good game with its own and strong personnality. We started programming only because we though we had original ideas for that game. We believe it's the only way to make something good and will continue strongly in this way.

Even with that we know it will not be easy to get out of the image of "just another voxel game" that many people may have without playing it.

What you say about staying as far away as possible of Minecraft sounds to us as a very good advice and that's exactly what we planed to do from the start. We developped our engine capabilities for doing different things in a different way. A lot of technical choices and optimisations was made with that in mind. Otherwise it wouldn't have any interest for users.

Yes you're right on the fact that advertising for "build game" isn't a good idea. That's simply not what the main interest of the game will be. And it's not what Blackvoxel realy aims to bring.

But at this time we want to start getting feedbacks and speaking of Blackvoxel, but we hesitate to advertise too strongly on features that aren't yet usable or fully implemented. We don't wanted seeing user complaining "where are the features you advertised". There are also features we does not want to speak about until they would be implemented. So we advertised mainly on features that are present in the game at this time.

Of course, things will change as the heart of the game will show progressively with each update.

One more thing, thanks again for the quality of your feedback as it will be usefull.

Blackvoxel Team

[SuperDisk]

This game is quite cool! 2 control suggestions though, you might want to have it so when you hold down the 'voxel place (mouse 2)' button, it will continue to place voxels, instead of you having to push the button repeatedly. Same for the 'break button (mouse 1)', if you hold down the button while not aiming at a voxel, and then turn to look at one, it won't start breaking it, you have to release your mouse and then click again to start breaking. Hope that's not too hard to understand, as it's rather clumsily worded.

Anyway, pretty neat game you have! 

[Blackvoxel]

Hi all, and thanks for all your useful replies and for the time you spent evaluating our program.

Here are some fresh news from Blackvoxel after a new developpment cycle.

This release brings many improvements to the game.

> Big graphic engine rework. Better rendering speed and arbitration. This was needed for optimal performances of dynamic reaction features.
> Completely reworked sound engine.
> Completed the Voxel Dynamic Reaction Engine. This feature enables to start showing what's the goal of our game. We start introducing the dynamic features that what was annonced long ago.
> Chemical reactions introduced.
> Interractive dynamic blocs : Moving rocks, Moving liquids, Voxel manipulation for interaction with environnment.
> Automatics and bloc manipulations : pumps, materializers, loaders, light transmiters.
> Software Interfaces between voxels allow some of them to communicate, make material transfers or various other things.
> Vehicles : Plane is completed and availlable. Flight simulation in blackvoxel.
> New materials.
> Dynamic liquids and gases : Water, Green acid, Acid Gas.
> Playfield expanded with 3 new zones. It's where you'll find liquids.
> 64 bits native version for Linux, that's adding 2 versions of the game for a total of 6.
> Windows 8 added to supported OS.
> A lot of things we forgot to mention, bug fixes, internal changes, optimizations, etc ...
> Voxel Reference manual on the internet site explaining voxel functionnalities and how to use (still incomplete).
> To do : A lot of things.

We hope you'll enjoy this release. More to come further. More automatics, more programming. Remember the goal of BlackVoxel : a game to learn automatics and programmation in an interactive voxel world.

Website http://www.blackvoxel.com

Blackvoxel Team

[Ankmannen]

Sweet! I love the concept! It's an amazing feeling to land on the totally empty grid! Watching your trailer really got me inspired.

I felt a mix between Tron and Avatar (strangly enough). A suggestion would be to add luminous blocks in colors ala Avatar. I would personally love that!

Have to play some more, I'll get back to you with more feedback if you want it.

// AnkMannen

[Blackvoxel]

@Ankmannen

Thank you for your positive comments.

Your feedback will be welcome!

Blackvoxel Team

[PlanetKiller]

Looks good from the video; like mindcrack on steroids. I'll play the demo when I get home today.

I played the demo.
The timer to re-spawn took too long, I got bored waiting to re-spawn. The world looks dark and empty, and most blocks suffer from "programmer art". Other than that, the game looks good. Combing the bomb block with a fire block was interesting, and the world is big, but getting anywhere is slow. Fortunately, I learned how to dash using the "n" and other nearby keys. With some work this game could be better than minecraft.

[Blackvoxel]

Looks good from the video; like mindcrack on steroids. I'll play the demo when I get home today.

I played the demo.
The timer to re-spawn took too long, I got bored waiting to re-spawn. The world looks dark and empty, and most blocks suffer from "programmer art". Other than that, the game looks good. Combing the bomb block with a fire block was interesting, and the world is big, but getting anywhere is slow. Fortunately, I learned how to dash using the "n" and other nearby keys. With some work this game could be better than minecraft.

Thank you for having tested the game. Your comments will help us to improve the game, and we appreciate their true value. If you have time, you can test the new demo version. We have enabled the aircraft which was previously reserved for the full version. This should change things significantly for travel time.

[Blackvoxel]

Hello friends, a new release is out.

This version 1.13 mainly brings programming in the game : a programmable robot-voxel using squirrel programming language. Squirrel is a "C style syntax" language with a lot of cool features. We made a fully documented set of 18 functions to control the robot. There are also many small changes in the game. New materials, new active voxels like the conveyor belts. And the aircraft now made available in the demo version.

For using the aircraft, put the aircraft voxel on the ground (it is in your inventory), use your middle mouse button while pointing the voxel to get in it. Then start the engine by pressing the "D" (or whatever you defined for <right>). Now make a long push to the "W" key (or whatever you defined for <forward>) to get the thrust at full power. Then control the plane with your mouse.Don't forget, like a true plane, you must pull towards you to make your plane to climb.

With the aircraft, you can discover the world pretty quickly. The blackvoxel's world is made of concentric zones surrounding central area like rings. So you can go in straight line along the grid in any direction to see all landscapes.

Thanks for your feedback.

[Blackvoxel]

Hello,

Blackvoxel is now in Steam Greenlight here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=158648177

Blackvoxel Indiegogo is live:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/blackvoxel--4

@ Cheezmeister, bitMasquerade, Jwosty, SuperDisk, Ankmannen, PlanetKiller

Thank you for your comments on the Blackvoxel game. We offer you a gift code to get freely the commercial version of Blackvoxel ! (see your email or your message in Tigsource)

The Blackvoxel Team
http://www.blackvoxel.com