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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.
Go Schwa!
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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 peop…
Thanks Bob! Totally agree with you - it really is a battle of fighting against my "engineering instinct" which just wants to build stuff all day, no matter how useless it is. I have deliberated over this internally with myself and others for a long time. In fact, half way into the character animation I was kicking myself for even beginning working on it. I tend to justify things (whether rational or not) as a content…
That can also be a trap (one that I myself am particularly prone to given how much I love roguelikes and tool-building). When it comes to games, I'm just not wired right to enjoy hand-authoring content. So when I do game-like stuff, I tend to lean towards procedural generation because it lets me avoid that unpleasant task.
But, I've learned, painfully, time and time again, that that tends to be way harder than hand-authoring. It kind of makes sense. If hand-drawing a fun level is difficult for me to do, why should it be easier for me to write a program than can author a million of them? In some sense, the latter must be strictly harder since it is a superset of hand-authoring a few one-off things.
Tool-building does matter, of course. But sometimes you just gotta make some stuff.
Another option is to push it onto the player: make the gameplay itself creative. That can work (SimCity), but it can also fizzle out (Spore).
The problem there is similar, I think. With hand-authored content, you have to come up with a narrative path or maybe a tree through the possible game space that's fun to play. With player-authored content, the entire play space has to be fun. Otherwise they'll be able to make anything, but most of the stuff they make won't be fun to make.
From a technical point of view it's amazing. Artistically, the voxels are too big to look impressive to anyone used to polygon graphics, and too small to give off the "pixel-art" aesthetic of Minecraft or Terarria. I want to play the game evoked by the banner at the top of the page, but not the one I see in the video.
I love the Voxel Quest posts because they're demonstrating some seriously cool tech. However, they feel a lot like the Wolfire development blogs [0] - great tech demos without a cohesive vision for a game. From an engineering point of view, the end goal doesn't matter, but I would also love a 'bigger picture' roadmap of where it is and where it's going. Why would I use this engine? What do I 'get' over the competitio…
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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?
I love the Voxel Quest posts because they're demonstrating some seriously cool tech. However, they feel a lot like the Wolfire development blogs [0] - great tech demos without a cohesive vision for a game. From an engineering point of view, the end goal doesn't matter, but I would also love a 'bigger picture' roadmap of where it is and where it's going. Why would I use this engine? What do I 'get' over the competitio…
This is a really good question actually. This engine isn't really meant to compete with major engines, but moreso satisfy a little niche (and maybe that could be a big niche depending on how it gets used). I think the best way to explain it is "Shadertoy for large environments" - being able to quickly dynamically create stuff with pure code. To be honest a lot of this is still unmapped territory and I'm not even one…
This gives just enough structure for players to escape the Second Life trap. (What happens to people who have no needs/problems in a virtual world? They go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy -- to Sex.)
Hopefully, this will provide the right kind of structure to let players game-balance the game themselves. (And give them enough scope to invent their way into and out of corners.)