61–70 of 81 posts
Great video. A new game engine powered by SDFs is the sort of thing I want to find out about. Not the next game in a long running franchise that looks the same as all the others that preceded it. One for the from-scratch game dev nerds like myself!
Stylistically there are similarities...
the problem with SDF engines is that you have to reinvent everything, as current pipelines rely on triangles. That means: - Software to model using SDF (like Womp) - Technique to animate skeletons using SDFs - Tool to procedural texture surfaces using SDFs At least he solved the physics part, which is also complex. And also, his way of carving is by instantiating new elements, which works for small carves, but if you…
Although a decent chunk of modern tooling is there to handle the limitations of triangles. And modelling is often using higher-level abstractions that are only turned into triangles at the end of the process.
Game / VFX artists heavily use mesh-based tools such as Maya or Blender.
This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation. I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (: Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[…
Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are: 1. Create a custom game engine.
Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!
Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either).
As for "create a hole, then close it behind you", this is about as game-changing as open/closing doors (or tunnels with doors). I'm open to suggestion, but honestly this is amazing tech, I just don't think it will create very fun games.
Kind of feel the same about the demos I see of spherical or non-euclidean geometry games. Its very interesting, and impressive, but seems like it is an engine in search of a game.
Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!
Have seen this with a lot of software "frameworks" (web, game, graphics, etc.). Nothing wrong with writing an amazing tech demo just for the hell of it, but then when it comes time to do "real world" tasks, the frameworks are often in search of a fitting problem.
Excellent technical presentation! Though the style itself is a bit too "clay-like", like I wouldn't expect a cube melding with the terrain sand to be a smooth glued connection. Is that some "inherent" SDF thing or just a style of the demo?
Basically it's the result of a smoothing function that blends the sampled SDF value of the two nearest bodies. You can simply pick the minimum SDF value and get no blending at all.
While this true for traditional SDF rendering (e.g. raymarching), the method of "interpolating cached distances" used here means that you will always get blending between objects.
This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation. I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (: Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[…
Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are: 1. Create a custom game engine.
This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation. I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (: Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[…
Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are: 1. Create a custom game engine.
This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation. I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (: Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[…
Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are: 1. Create a custom game engine.