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Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

voxelquest.com

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Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#11

Post by gavanwoolery »

BatFastard wrote: post #10

Wow, I was high sceptical that you would be able to scale this up past the short view distance. But not only have you managed to get a good view distance, but you also added in a nice animation system. Congrats to you! This is coming from someone who has spent years designing their own voxel platform. Please get this out to users to let them start building things, you will be amazed at what they can create.

Thanks! Don't tell anyone, but I was legitimately skeptical too. :)

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#12

Post by dsugarman »

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I am just really inspired by your work, you can see the trajectory of this project with each update. The environments look simply beautiful with the huge view distance.

The big unproven thing is building something that is fun. I look at Spore as this great unbelievable game engine that accomplished exactly what it set out to do. But they forgot to make the game fun, don't be Spore.

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#13

Post by gavanwoolery »

sergiotapia wrote: post #9

For the uninitiated why is this exciting? The graphics look really washed out and jittery. Thanks!

Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes large, so this make its easy for users to share their creations with each other (which could be just a few kilobytes in size). It is able to represent an area of several square kilometers with virtually no memory footprint (something of this detail would require several gigabytes of memory to store all the vertices for polygon data, not to mention the texture data). This entire scene can change instantly based on user parameters. I don't do a great job of demoing all of this but I should in the future. :)

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#14

Post by mynewtb »

justinpombrio wrote: post #7
gavanwoolery wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Glad you like them. I apologize in advance that I kind of tend to drone on (both a combination of being tired (I shot this video several hours ago at around 5 am) and my already monotone voice.

Don't worry: your passion comes through in your work, if not in your voice. EDIT. To give some unsolicited advice: From my experience giving presentations, if you want to give a demo that sounds good, I recommend around a dozen practice runs.

Or separate video and audio capture.

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#15

Post by sergiotapia »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #13
sergiotapia wrote: post #9

For the uninitiated why is this exciting? The graphics look really washed out and jittery. Thanks!

Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes…

That sounds really interesting, so compared to traditional polygon based graphics voxel is absolutely tiny?

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#17

Post by gavanwoolery »

dsugarman wrote: post #12

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I am just really inspired by your work, you can see the trajectory of this project with each update. The environments look simply beautiful with the huge view distance. The big unproven thing is building something that is fun. I look at Spore as this great unbelievable game engine that accomplished exactly what it set out to do. But they forgot to make the game fun, don…

I agree. Funny enough I came into making this thinking the "fun" aspect of it would be the easy part. Just assemble all the pieces and suddenly it is fun, right? Concept is really key - doesn't matter how many features you have, if your core concept is no good you have no game.

Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

#18

Post by gavanwoolery »

sergiotapia wrote: post #15
gavanwoolery wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes…

That sounds really interesting, so compared to traditional polygon based graphics voxel is absolutely tiny?

Depends on how you are representing stuff. The name is a slight misnomer that hails to the early days of this project when everything was strictly voxel based. Now the only thing voxels are used for is to determine the basic terrain addition and destruction. Voxels tend to be more storage efficient because their location is inherent to their index and vice versa.
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