Oh, looks very promising indeed! I'll be waiting for a linux version of this game!
I'm extremely interested in the shadow-casting algorithm. I've been trying to get my shadows working, and even in the semi-static environment my voxel engine's working with, I can't get it working fast enough. Obviously a single, static directional lightsource affords some optimisation, but I still end up casting and checking over a million rays :(
I found about you and this game from wikipedia :))
i searched for info about voxel tech for games and here i am.
It looks absolutely fantastic.
if you could integrate the destruction into the gameplay your game should be an instant classic and you a millionaire... maybe
(some people don't have good taste).
Sorry for the dbl post. But i can't wait to play this baby. and I stay tuned for any news you will share about your renderer and engine.
I check in occasionally also. Just remembered that you are based in Japan and New Zealand. Hoping you are alright with the recent events in Japan. Wish you and your loved ones the best.
MisterCat, I went through the same process as you. The voxel renderer started off as a by-product of a raytracer using a regular occupancy grid for optimisation. That was about 6 years ago on a 600MHz cpu, and I couldn't get more than 5 fps out it for a 64^3 scene at 640x480. If you don't want to do any fancy reflections etc., just brute force it with polygon rasterization! For typical gamey world scenes it's not as expensive as you might imagine.
MIK3K, thanks for your concern. We're in Tokyo so got off pretty lightly. I certainly know a lot more about iodine-131 and weather patterns than I did a month ago though!
Wow. Can't wait for it to come out!! Been checking site every day!
Out of curiosity, are the particles constrained to the voxel grid? or are they free moving? it's hard to tell from the trailer.
@DigitalD
I don't have a date for an alpha release yet -- my plans are still up in the air. I'm quite keen to get something out early though (along with Linux versions of my other games), so hopefully can announce something soon.
@isidor3
Everything is on the grid -- objects are first blitted to a voxel buffer and then the whole buffer is drawn to the screen at once. So it's not possible to move anything less than a voxel or to rotate it -- basically the 3d version of a low resolution pixel game.
When you release the game are you also going to release the model creator, or possibly a level editor?
For this game I'd easily pay 20 bucks it looks like it's going to be awesome!
You should make it have a sandbox mode or something similar!
Looks rad man. Love the destructible walls and the music works very well with the game.
Would love to see transparent/ice/class walls... unless it slows the game too much :)
Keep up the good work and get that pre-order system up. The game looks very promising.
@Iamogam
yes, there's a level & voxel designer built in.
@Kurbs
the editor feels a little bit like a sandbox mode.. you can throw in a bunch of items and play with them in god mode. Over time I'll add more stuff to play with which isn't relevant to the main arcade game side of things.
@oneSaint
Transparent surfaces are fun but slightly slow and not as useful as I imagined. The only variation in surface material I'm using so far is a reflective one, just by flipping all the voxels and tinting them (click for a larger version)
Level and Voxel designer built in . . . . SOLD!!!!
Actually, I was sold with the first video, but whatever. The excitement is renewed.
Please, where do I insert the money for this? I cannot seem to find the buy button anywhere. Hurry please, playstation network had my credit card information and I don't know how much longer I will have money in my bank account.
Sorry - good to hear you were okay in Tokyo.
And to the guy above who would pay $20 for this . . . pffftttt, I'll pay $30 and I'll take 3 copies to start. Hmmm, can you sign my copies? Probably not. It's okay.
What did you code this in? C++ and opengl or what stuff are you using? I'm interested!
So, how's the development coming?
edit- Oh, and how do you store your 3D models? You do that in some sort of table with 3D coordinates/colors/properties?
@macattack It's written in C with a software renderer. I'll post some details on the workings of the engine closer to release
@fskn ok-ish!
The 3d models are stored just with a simple raw dump of colour values, much the same way raw 2d image formats do. In fact, internally I represent a voxmap as a vertical stack of 2d images.
I have a compressed version of the file format too for sharing user-made levels, which is encoded in the form of a .PNG file with a thumbnail.
Seriously, I'm really really really looking forward to this release. Great work indeed! :)
I'm still excited. Every day that passes, we are one day closer. Gonna be awesome.
I have had this game in mind for the past week, and only now the word "voxel" popped back into my head. I Googled for "voxel block game", and lo and behold, I found you again!
I'm looking forward to the release of your game. Best of luck polishing it up! And thanks Voxel Man for the catchy music too.
Alright, I wonder that you might have tried to use RGBA then, for transparency, on those 2D images you stack.
Older games didn't have transparency, though, so I think it would add to the charm not having it here either.
Do you think you could release a new demo video soon..? I'm so eager to get this game!
Wow! I spent over a year working on a voxel engine (and the associated gameplay). In the end I abandoned it because I couldn't get the performance to an acceptable level. Here's the dev blog if anyone is interested
http://wanderinggames.com/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=1
Great work.
Mr. Lexaloffle posted something is going to happen soon at the bottom of the page - https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=213
" I'm going to announce something about this very soon. Please subscribe to the newsletter! (Or check back here)"
Something to keep us amused - amateur haiku
Voxatron I want
It looks very, very good
Where is the buy page
Yep i get the feeling that voxatron is gonna melt cheese on toast real soon. it will be EPIC!
First off, this looks great, awesome job! Secondly, I'd like to see if I could pick your brain without revealing to much of your implementation.
You said that each scene you are calculating whether a voxel is on the "surface" or rather if it has an empty neighbor cube. You also stated that each map is basically a stack of PNG images. So does that mean you are using array based indexing to find neighbors.
The reason I am asking is I am tinkering around with a voxel based engine. I store my data in an octree so I can merge voxels an octree node either has all or no voxels. My huge bottleneck is walking the octree each pass, so I am very interested in other people's approaches to this problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzelLGZ7W0s&feature=related
Again, your game looks great!
Wow, this thread is fully of really interesting technical discussion! I'm totally amateur so even this basic stuff is almost too much for me, but it's still really cool to read all of this.
Zep, I hope you consider talking a little bit about the behind-the-scenes aspect of this before it comes out. I know you don't want to spend a long time writing up stuff, and you also don't want to give away all your trade secrets ;) but, even if it's just simple stuff, we'd love to hear about it!
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