Are the game engine and game coupled together?
Meaning if I purchase the Alpha game key, will that give me access to the game engine during Alpha to start looking at that side of things?
Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#32Is 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?
Thank you! I have two small-time investors currently, although I am still living relatively minimally (I also put in a good deal of money from personal savings, and ~$35k came from Kickstarter). Its pretty much a every spare second of your life type thing, especially with a baby. :)
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#33Are the game engine and game coupled together? Meaning if I purchase the Alpha game key, will that give me access to the game engine during Alpha to start looking at that side of things?
Yes, in fact the full source is going up on github, likely right around or during release of the first alpha build.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#34Are the game engine and game coupled together? Meaning if I purchase the Alpha game key, will that give me access to the game engine during Alpha to start looking at that side of things?
Yes, in fact the full source is going up on github, likely right around or during release of the first alpha build.
Oh, wow! How did I miss this? If you are pushing the source on github (regardless of license, I want to avoid that rathole) just so others can learn from what you did, then where do I go to fund you?
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Depends on what you classify as efficient: mem usage, gpu workload, etc. Voxels are easy to work with but often represent more data than your really need.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Depends on what you classify as efficient: mem usage, gpu workload, etc. Voxels are easy to work with but often represent more data than your really need.
I was mainly asking in general terms of "gamedev" efficient: Whatever deforms and renders at a playable rate and looks just as good as the alternatives.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#37Will this game in the future be able to run, ported or otherwise, on the proposed Voxatron Game Console[0] by Lexaloffle[1]?
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#38Wow, 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. :)
Many many many game developers get sucked into the infinite vortex of trying to "find the fun". A computer is a very large blank canvas and the set of all possible games is infinite. It can be overwhelming trying to decide what game to make.
Often, developers wander off to "make an engine" partially as an excuse to put off making those scary decisions. But an engine isn't a game and if you want to ship something people can play (and not just make games themselves with) you do have to make that choice.
You've made an insane amount of progress, but I wonder if you're struggling with this too. If I can make two suggestions that might help:
1. Realize a negative choice has positive value.
Every idea or feature sounds cool, so the default answer to "Should I add ___?" or "Can the player do ___?" or "Can the engine support ___?" is going to be "yes" because it all sounds fun. But the end result is something that takes infinite time to produce. Your time is finite.
It takes courage, but I find I make better progress when I deliberately allow myself to choose not to do something. Remember, any feature you omit pays you back in the most important currency: time. By saying, for example, "No multiplayer", you're saying "Yes" to a lot of other features you will now have time to implement.
2. Make the game that only your engine can do.
You're in an unusual position in that you already have a very interesting, unique engine. Most developers out there just have half-baked clones of existing engines.
When you're trying to figure out what kind of game to build on top of that engine, focus relentlessly on the kind of gameplay your engine, and only your engine can support. For me, that's rich, detailed, destructible terrain. If it doesn't take advantage of voxels, cut it.
Looking at the videos over the past year, I see lots and lots of basic character animation. Every game engine can do that. It's not interesting to see yours can too, and it takes (took) a ton of your time to do it. Don't spend time catching up to other engines. Spend time building on top of what you already have.
I don't care if a character in the game is a simple billboard—I actually think billboard characters would look nice with the pixely voxel style—I'm coming to your engine for the terrain. Everything else is secondary.
Good luck! It's been inspiring watching you make progress on this.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#39Will this game in the future be able to run, ported or otherwise, on the proposed Voxatron Game Console[0] by Lexaloffle[1]? [0] http://www.lexaloffle.com/games.php?page=consoles [1] http://www.lexaloffle.com/
I love Voxatron, but not likely - Voxatron's rendering is quite different. It is one of the few "pure" voxel engines in existence.
Re: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update
#40Wow, it's like looking into the viewport of the future of video games.