Hey!
Been working on a super secret project for over a year that I thought I'd share to see who is interested, if anyone.
I wanted an engine that could render pixel art from any perspective using voxel data, this has a few benefits including:
- Dynamic Lighting
- Dynamic Shadow Mapping
- Dynamic Normal Mapping
- Runtime camera rotation
- Uses standard 4x4 matrices and 3d vectors
- Raytraced Lighting
- Fast and easy physics/collisions
- Fully Destructible Environments
- 1 pixel = 1 voxel in orthographic perspective
- Infinite World Streaming
- SSAO
- Isometric, diametric, oblique, who the fuck cares - its supported
Take the following isometric scene
Usually it'd be comprised of flat layers, or a tileset collection like this
But then your artist has to draw every angle that your camera can possibly rotate to, usually isometric games allow some form of camera rotation but usually its a hacky way of rotating map data and using 4 different sprites. Then you are still working with 2D information, so you have to hack and fake alot of calculations to fake 3D effects.
What if you could just supply a different camera angle and it'd just "work"?
This provides alot of gameplay benefits, and you could even develop mechanics around it (think Fez). Of course, it can be completely side view or even top down.
And here is a wall with some guttering, one of the "tiles" in the above images:
For a typical isometric viewpoint, the cache would look a bit like this. Each chunk (64x64x64 voxels) is rendered to a 128x128 image:
Here's some of the fancy effects that I listed above:
Let me know if any questions, I can provide some more technical info if you are interested. Here's some misc videos of experiments that I did in the engine:
Gameplay test
REALLY EARLY prototype stuff
https://youtu.be/uw47BE8y6QMhttps://youtu.be/lJcy-VWDpWY?t=1
Developer
