So glad I kickstarted this. Very excited about the progress. Keep on with it. One of the projects I'm okay waiting a long time for because I know it's going to be worth the wait!
Thanks for backing :) I hope it is!
Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
21–30 of 132 posts
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#22Link is dead right now, the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#23I was curiously drawn to back this even though I haven't paid for any other video game of any kind in several years. It is exciting to see how far things have come. Can't wait to try it.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#24I was curiously drawn to back this even though I haven't paid for any other video game of any kind in several years. It is exciting to see how far things have come. Can't wait to try it.
I'm flattered - can't wait to ship it :)
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#25For 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…
Why are the voxels (I guess the jagged edges come from the voxels?) so big?
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#26Is gavanwoolery made of magic and unicorns? This is amazing and his progress is nothing short of astounding.
If he's reading this: how do you fund work like this? You said you're raising a kid, I've got two! Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing?
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#27Earlier 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?
Voxels are discrete, so not absolutely tiny. Voxel = vox (volume) + el (element), similar to pixel = pix (picture) + el. Do you know Minecraft? All those cubes in its world are voxels.
The amazing thing here is how tiny this guy's voxels are while still keeping the game running at a decent framerate.
Compared to traditional polygon graphics: voxels are discrete elements in space (sort of like "giant atoms") while polygons are the surface of objects (cuts of planes in 3d space). Being merely polygons they have no depth (as GP said, they're paper-thin) while voxels are inherently volumes in your space. You could compare it to Lego vs. papercraft.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#28Is gavanwoolery made of magic and unicorns? This is amazing and his progress is nothing short of astounding. If he's reading this: how do you fund work like this? You said you're raising a kid, I've got two! Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing?
> Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing?
Phew, I don't even have kids, and I can't maintain a couple-hours-a-night hobby between maintaining relations, dinner, and a fairly late bedtime.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#29Go Schwa!
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Now the only thing voxels are used for is to determine the basic terrain addition and destruction.
Do you find that to be pretty efficient compared to other methods of terrain deformation (ROAM,etc)? Pretty curious, since I did my big undergrad research paper on deformable terrain in videogames before the huge voxel craze.