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[TonyManfredonia]

Wooooah! That latest environment is great!

I love its color palette, especially.

[Seaport]

Hey thanks Xonatron and amanfr01 for the comments

[Seaport]

Little video of a cracking effect we've added to the grenades when it explodes, it's purely cosmetic but adds to the effect I think. We're getting closer on the demo level, the AI is playing a lot better now that it has paths to follow and hunt you down with. We've tweaked the health of the enemies to make them more challenging as well.

[fireboy]

Waiting anxiously.

[Seaport]

Hi fireboy, hopefully we wont let you down and its worth the wait 

Here's a slightly bigger gif showing off the grenade effect a little clearer

[Schrompf]

I like the voxelized artstyle. You really make good use of it with those trees and cliffs. I'm working on something similar in my spare time, in terms of technology, so I'm curious about the inner workings of your tech. Have you come up with some nice tricks to speed up mesh generation, or to store voxels more densely?

[Seaport]

Hi Schrompf, it's great you're using voxels, I think there is a lot of under used potential in them.
. I'll give Dazza a kick as he's the brains behind our tech, he might be able to give you some pointers

[djr]

I like the voxelized artstyle. You really make good use of it with those trees and cliffs. I'm working on something similar in my spare time, in terms of technology, so I'm curious about the inner workings of your tech. Have you come up with some nice tricks to speed up mesh generation, or to store voxels more densely?

Hi Schrompf,

The short answer is no, nothing clever. For the longish answer:

Firstly we're using PolyVox for the underlying voxel storage. Polyvox does some clever stuff but we pretty much use a Raw Volume. This means we use a LOT of memory but for our game we found it slower to compress the voxel chunks than to store them in their raw form.

We chunk the world pretty small, our chunks are 32^3 and for some islands we make them 16^3. Combined with multithreaded mesh generation and we can just about run at 60fps with a lot of destruction. At the moment the bottleneck is my weak rendering code and the physics, not the voxel generation. We very carefully design our levels though, in fact the whole floating island design is there to minimise the technical challenges and maximise the fun.

Each voxel is a 16 bit value 8 bits for color and 8 bits for flags.

Hope that helps, if you have any more questions please ask me

[Schrompf]

Thanks for the answer! Interesting, didn't know PolyVox before. I wanted much larger datasets, therefore I'm doing a lot of sophisticated compressing, but of course that complicates everything. One of the things I haven't solved yet is the physics. Are you doing anything rigid body? If yes, how?

Thanks for your time. Feel free to ignore any question if it's too much effort to answer.

[djr]

Thanks for the answer! Interesting, didn't know PolyVox before. I wanted much larger datasets, therefore I'm doing a lot of sophisticated compressing, but of course that complicates everything. One of the things I haven't solved yet is the physics. Are you doing anything rigid body? If yes, how?

I think that Polyvox has a paging mechanism that can read in pages from disk so you might want to look at at that to see if there is anything inspirational.

For physics I've integrated Bullet physics. We use the rigid and soft body physics worlds. I started with a custom collider type, one for each chunk, and supplied Bullet with triangles to collide against as needed. This proved to be more expensive than just building triangles collision meshes as the render geometry is built.

There is a cost to adding and subtracting meshes from the physics world so the code staggers the collision mesh changes over a few frame depending on how far away the meshes are from the players. I think we only change four collision meshes per frame to keep the cost down and smooth out lumps in the cpu usage.

I've read some people on reddit voxeldev talking about implementing their own physics solutions and I think there is some mileage in that given the restrictions of a voxel world but we don't really have time for that. Bullet is very robust.

[Seaport]

I'd completely forgotten about our soft body wobbly physics
here's a blast from the past (page 2 to be exact  )

[Schrompf]

Nice :-) Yeah, am using Bullet, too. Maybe I should simply generate cube meshes, too. I went for a voxel style of "round blobs" like this:

https://zfx.info/download/file.php?id=3404 - Image reduced to a link - this is your thread after all, not mine.

And I wanted a "rounded" collision to suit it. Turns out writing collision tests for all basic primitives bullet supports is a hellishly difficult task, and might even turn out to be superfluous because nobody notices a difference at a Voxel size of 5cm (2") But then: project's on hold anyways until I can get rid of my full time job.

PS: and I just noticed while browsing this thread: I already wrote you the nearly exact same praise on page one. I don't feel bad, though, it was worth repeating.

[FROGANUS]

Wow really brilliant! I love stumbling across a couple years of work for the first time- seeing a nice game shape itself before my eyes. The artwork is great, the natural outdoor spaces look so nice it's almost a shame to blast craters everywhere. The explosions seem to have have come along, the AI as well.

I wonder is there a bedrock layer that keeps an essential base, or can player fall through? If voxel bits are left isolated in the air do they fall?

Also I wonder about jumping/jetpacking- it dosn't look like you can really jump much?
I guess vertical emphasis could complicate a game like this, as an essentially top down shooter but for things like hopping across a gap, it looked like there should have been more hop, also jumping might be cool during battles (I wouldn't speculate about this having not played it, and not sure of your direction, tho).

 

[djr]

Nice :-) Yeah, am using Bullet, too. Maybe I should simply generate cube meshes, too. I went for a voxel style of "round blobs" like this:

https://zfx.info/download/file.php?id=3404 - Image reduced to a link - this is your thread after all, not mine.

And I wanted a "rounded" collision to suit it. Turns out writing collision tests for all basic primitives bullet supports is a hellishly difficult task, and might even turn out to be superfluous because nobody notices a difference at a Voxel size of 5cm (2") But then: project's on hold anyways until I can get rid of my full time job.

PS: and I just noticed while browsing this thread: I already wrote you the nearly exact same praise on page one. I don't feel bad, though, it was worth repeating.

Is that a Splatter level? Did you go for blob style for a more organic feel? Bullet can be devilishly complicated in place, that's for sure, but it's so well written it's lovely to work with. It's got insanely fast trianglemesh<->primitive collision as well.

Compliments are always nice to hear, we've worked on SnW for over two years now and as I'm sure you know, it can be hard to remain committed. Any morale boost is more than welcome Thanks.

[Schrompf]

Nice :-) Yeah, am using Bullet, too. Maybe I should simply generate cube meshes, too. I went for a voxel style of "round blobs" like this:

https://zfx.info/download/file.php?id=3404 - Image reduced to a link - this is your thread after all, not mine.

And I wanted a "rounded" collision to suit it. Turns out writing collision tests for all basic primitives bullet supports is a hellishly difficult task, and might even turn out to be superfluous because nobody notices a difference at a Voxel size of 5cm (2") But then: project's on hold anyways until I can get rid of my full time job.

PS: and I just noticed while browsing this thread: I already wrote you the nearly exact same praise on page one. I don't feel bad, though, it was worth repeating.

Is that a Splatter level? Did you go for blob style for a more organic feel? Bullet can be devilishly complicated in place, that's for sure, but it's so well written it's lovely to work with. It's got insanely fast trianglemesh<->primitive collision as well.

No, Splatter was a topdown shooter. This is from the "next" project, still unnamed and not really in development at the moment. I wanted blobby voxels to give it a "vague" impression, to make it look more naturally than the well-defined edges of cubes. Some day I'll continue working on it, and then there will be a project thread, too.

[djr]

I wonder is there a bedrock layer that keeps an essential base, or can player fall through? If voxel bits are left isolated in the air do they fall?

Also I wonder about jumping/jetpacking- it dosn't look like you can really jump much?
I guess vertical emphasis could complicate a game like this, as an essentially top down shooter but for things like hopping across a gap, it looked like there should have been more hop, also jumping might be cool during battles (I wouldn't speculate about this having not played it, and not sure of your direction, tho).

We can paint voxels as indestructible and some of the brushes we use to build the levels have that set automagically. We don't want the player to make the level impossible. It's a bit of a testing nightmare but the destruction is so much fun it's worth it.

The player does have a dash which boosts them horizontally for about 5 meters. This is to get across gaps and they are also invincible while dashing so they can get through bullet patterns. They also have a vertical boost which shoots them up about eight meters vertically. From there they drift down. This is a get out of jail move when there are too many enemies but it also unlocks a few secret areas they can't get to just with blasting. It's useful for when the player has mad a massive hole in the world and they jump in to it and then can't walk out as well 

Thanks for the kind words.

[djr]

No, Splatter was a topdown shooter. This is from the "next" project, still unnamed and not really in development at the moment. I wanted blobby voxels to give it a "vague" impression, to make it look more naturally than the well-defined edges of cubes. Some day I'll continue working on it, and then there will be a project thread, too.

I like it, you should pick it up again. I love working with voxels, the way the world can become part of the gameplay is so much fun. Not without challenges though. I hope you get time to carry on with it.

[djr]

Between major levels of the game, as a bonus/reward section, the player gets to fly a space ship, the levels are sort of like short Star Fox levels. I've been working on the trails coming out the back. Here are a few shots.





They're not perfect and we need to hide the anchor point with some more engine particles but I think they are coming along... and yes you can do a barrel roll 

[Seaport]

Quick rener of one of the ships that will appear most likely in in-game cut scenes
Pre-rendered



In the editor

[Xonatron]

Impressive that you are using your own engine (after ditching Unity). What API/framework/language are you coding in? Enjoying your progress on this game.