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[Cunnah]

I just had an idea that you might not like. Why not, since you have a very good voxel style for your characters, remove the trees and replace them with slightly high res models, in a deeper green, then add shrubs and grass etc... then you have a variation of green rather than just one grass green, you could even add creepers to the sides of certain cliffs to break up the greyness.

[wollay]

Thanks for the inspirations! Especially Cunnah whose idea didn't let me sleep tonight. I just had to create those trees:





I actually love your idea, Cunnah. I also think that the voxel sprites are a big strength of the game and that I should model more details with the voxel editor. Thanks!

[Deidril]

Your game looks more beautiful every day. It's impressive how you use some feedback quickly to improve your game.

Keep the line!

[capn.lee]

if you're going to model trees, may I recommend modelling in some thick roots for under the ground too rather than just have a flat bottom.

[Cunnah]

either that or have a check that the trees have a minimum number of voxels at its base so it doesn't over hang.

Looking real good. Your making me jealous that voxel editor looks fun! 

[RichMakeGame!]

it'd be nicer to have roots tho! I'd love to see some cave with roots poking out the ceiling, or roots jutting out from a cliffside with trees up above. adds to the 'richness' of the world I think

[DeadPixel]

Those trees change the look 100% for the better I think.  Great job!

[capn.lee]

it'd be nicer to have roots tho! I'd love to see some cave with roots poking out the ceiling, or roots jutting out from a cliffside with trees up above. adds to the 'richness' of the world I think

exarptly

[knight]

Looks great, but I think water would add so much to the game.

[_Tommo_]

Looks great, but I think water would add so much to the game.

Also grass!

[ambinate]

this has already come a long way just over the past few days.  looking really nice so far! 

[Dragonmaw]

Pretty stunned by how polished this looks already. Watching this thread closely.

[Starflier]

This is really pretty looking. You've done a good job of making it "Not Minecraft" which I suppose isn't hugely important, but it's always nice to be distinctive.

It looks like it should be a show on Treehouse. But in a good way. 

[nospoon]

Hello, my first post btw.

What are you using for storing voxels ?
3D Array or octree ?
I experimented alot with minecraft-like voxel things, and from my experience if you want to have lots of voxels (i mean like 4x more than in minecraft), then you should store them in an Octree.

So if you would use some clever octree - you could store like 4x more voxels.
It would be harder/slower to make fluid simulations on this, and overall manipulating voxels is slower.
Still - rendering, mem usage is nice.

Basically if a node of an octree is not full - it doesnt waste memory, and when there is 8 cubes near each other - you could save it as one bigger cube.

[wollay]

Hi everyone, it's great that you like the trees. Thanks for the tips about the roots, I'm working it! Also grass and things like bushes are on my list.

@Starflier
I didn't know Treehouse before, but now I do (via Google). Well, my inspirations are games like Zelda or Secret of Mana, so maybe that's why everything looks so kids-friendly and maybe cute.

@nospoon
I also thought about an octree, but wanted to keep it simple, so things like collision detection etc. become trivial. What I came up with is the following:

I use basically 3D arrays but in a 3-level hierarchy: The lowest level is a chunk which contains a 16x16x16 array of voxels. If the space is empty, like in the sky or a big cave, the chunk is null, so no memory is allocated at all. The next level is a 'zone' consisting of a 16x16x8 chunks. Each zone is generated in a background thread while the player walks through the world. Zones that haven't been visited yet are null. The top level is a big 2D array of zones, the world. I also found that compressing chunks with zlib saves a lot of memory - I do it for all chunks that are not needed anymore.

Your octree idea sounds very interesting. I like the idea of a world consisting of both high-res and low-res cubes.

[Conker534]

my inspirations are games like Zelda or Secret of Mana, so maybe that's why everything looks so kids-friendly and maybe cute.

Cute games are the best. :D

[nospoon]

@wollay
Your idea seems good, it's alot better if you want to have lots of collision checks or fluid dynamics.

I had lots of ideas for cube-voxel rendering , so I thought that i could share them
Dunno if this will be helpful, but maybe someday someone will use it for something.
(I was/am making a voxel, multiplayer shooter, rendered with cubes and partially GL_POINT's)

I experimented with 2d array of octrees (and also with octree of 2d arrays) and both were decent, but it ended by using one big octree.

I did an octree with had a LoD level, so if something was in a long distance - it was rendered out of bigger cubes (or GL_POINTS).

Also good optimization is getting the meshes in near->far (not random) order, so the graphics card can make early z-something thing

I made rendering using displaylists, and it was rendering the map out of 'bigger' chunks.
So bassically let's say that tree has 10 levels, I set the renderLevel to 5 and lodLevel=10
and it would make me display lists with alot of cubes.
If i would set lodLevel to 6 - it would render me maximally 8 big cubes.

Also files were made in that way, they contained some lods (for ex. level 10, 8 , 6)
so I could just simply load a low resolution voxels.

I had the map saved at for ex. level 10 but i was limitting the splitting to 12, so an explosion could make really nice looking (almost worms -style) holes.

I was projecting the octree level that im curently working on to a 3d grid, and then I could optimize them (join the faces etc)

I read alot about optimizations in minecraft - and there is one, thats easy to use, and is suitable for your project :
When you are creating your mesh - split it by the direction 'where the face is looking'.
So you will have 8 meshes instead of 1 and you could render only these that are visible for the player.

[wollay]

@nospoon
That's very interesting, gotta check those optimizations.

I made a new video containing a few new features: water, trees and improved animations:

[AuthenticKaizen]

fantastic work... cube world gets better and better! 

the water adds so much to the gane!

[poe]

Still looking fantastic!
Suggestion: Why not have prebuilt structures that NPCs reside in, this way they can have detail as opposed to making them run around without a house or have shabby huts.