I don't really understand how this is a game, but I'm more than happy to pledge a few dollars to support talented people like you! Go voxels!
My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#42Tiberian Sun nostalgia. Love it.
Man, I loved the old C&C games. :)
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#43I don't really understand how this is a game, but I'm more than happy to pledge a few dollars to support talented people like you! Go voxels!
Woo! Its not really a game yet, but constructing an engine from scratch was a decision I made with intent. I've still got three years on my projected timeline to go, so I will be working further on making it a game. To use my goto comparison, if you look at the early days of Minecraft, it was just a cube-placer. Now most people call it a game. :)
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both - initially the engine source will be put out to help boost the community and mods around the game - a game is being built so that relevant features are added to the engine. Kind of dogfooding my own engine I guess. :)
What license will the engine be under?
Full source will be distributed with every game key, similar to licensing the Source SDK from Valve, but that is API-only IIRC. I would really, truly love to open source the whole thing but have to pay the bills for now. I think I will open source it if possible once I have made enough money to survive a few years (If I even get to that point!).
No royalties or fees are charged.
I also consider any licensing deal offered to me with pretty loose restrictions (and I have had two bigger requests in this regard so far).
If/when I get to the point of opensourcing, it will be a very permissive license - like ZLib or MIT.
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both - initially the engine source will be put out to help boost the community and mods around the game - a game is being built so that relevant features are added to the engine. Kind of dogfooding my own engine I guess. :)
Why do you want to wait to release the engine source instead of putting it on github right now ?
I'm guessing Gavan would like to protect his work a bit and not just give out licences to do anything you want with it - if others want to commercialise, he should get a fair cut, otherwise it's going to be a hard sell to investors. IMO that's completely understandable. I find it sad that things like non permissive CC licenses are regarded as so bad in the open source community - making a project like this completely open is very hard to do as a full time job because of that.
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both - initially the engine source will be put out to help boost the community and mods around the game - a game is being built so that relevant features are added to the engine. Kind of dogfooding my own engine I guess. :)
Which language did you use to make it?
C++, OpenGL, JSON is used for data storage, but not strict JSON (I allow comments and may add a few other features).
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#47This looks quite good in the video, good work!
You mention a few games as inspiring traits of Voxel Quest -- most of which are quite obvious -- including Hearthstone. In what ways was Hearthstone an influence? Art style, or something beyond that?
Edit: Just finished watching the entire video, it really does look fantastic. I will say, the one off-putting part of your game design philosophy for me was the whole "no long-term progression" thing. I find the way Rogue Legacy handles this a beautifully rewarding mashup of the roguelike quick permadeath and the feeling of making overall progress in the game world.
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
With polygons, you must explicitly pass in every vertex and corresponding data (unless you use a geometry shader). This gets huge fast - with just usually around 12 32 bit floats per vertex (position, normal, material and tex coords). That is 48 bytes per vertex. Not only that, but each vertex must be processed (transformed) and the resulting polygon clipped, which is usually a more or less order-dependent operation…
Any books / resources I can read ?
I actually never read any technical book beyond a few pages, and tend to avoid papers which are typically too academic for my needs (I really just look at raw source, if anything).
My best recommendation - dive in and start coding. You are your own best teacher. :)
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both - initially the engine source will be put out to help boost the community and mods around the game - a game is being built so that relevant features are added to the engine. Kind of dogfooding my own engine I guess. :)
Why do you want to wait to release the engine source instead of putting it on github right now ?
I will put it up on github soon :) License requires a game key for now, but will be open sourced eventually if I can afford to do so. (see other comment on open source)
Re: My Isometric Voxel Engine: One Year Later
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Networking is available, but not yet used for multiplayer. I'm not implementing it myself, but if modders want to that is fine. I've got way too many issues to address - as much as I would have like it in there, I had to prune my feature list and taking out networking made everything much easier to implement. Yeah I myself can't waste much time on games, obviously. I only pick up ones that I feel are good "re…
If anything, your procedural approach should make it easier, shouldn't it? Instead of transmitting level files you can only transmit some seed data, after that only transmit the updates. This should also make it possible for all players to change the map itself through interactions, like in Minecraft. I'm imagining something like the concept of No man's sky, applied to a low budget / community project, where every pl…
My initial investor was from Switzerland. As I mentioned in another comment, we found eachother on reddit. He is just a regular guy, gamer, and programmer - not by any means wealthy but he had enough in savings to get me some seed funding. By coincidence, I went to Germany right after we started making a deal (I was visiting my wife's family, who is from Germany). I made a pitstop in Switzerland to meet my investor, and bought the mug there in Zurich. :)
Procedural approach does make it much easier to generate content. I've already got everything in place to generate entire seamless maps with logical road, street, city, and house placement among other things, and it is pretty easy to extend for things like caves and dungeons.