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Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

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Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#41

Post by sixo »

yesitcan wrote: post #19
barcoder wrote: post #15

I'm a long time Unity developer that in the past year picked up Godot. The speed at which Godot loads compared to Unity is staggering, it's just so much faster. When I returned to Unity I raised that my flow state was constantly being broken in a way that it wasn't when using Godot. Entering flow is one of the beautiful things I love about programming. And being knocked out of it often feels like a physical jolt. Lob…

I get taken out of flow every time I submit my prompt to Claude. How’d you work around that?

Not every conversation is about AI. This one isn't.

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#42

Post by [deleted] »

Aeolun wrote: post #37
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #30

One issue with Voxel-based physics destruction games is that the physics happens in continuous space (as opposed to voxel space). This means that the moment you break off a chunk of geometry, it has to be converted into a mesh and simulated like any other mesh-based model will. This makes voxels seem like more complicated Voronoi-noise based fractures. If you want the modelling workflow or the looks of voxels, it's f…

This isn’t actually true if you use GPU raytracing, as everyone involved with voxel destruction seems to realize at one point or another. Meshing in a performant way after every destruction event is simply not possible.

[deleted]

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#43

Post by cpill »

I guess if I'd done all that work on lobster and then bipolar built a ray traced voxel engine on top of that, end game would be to licence the engine. You have something here that the other game engines don't have, and something Minecraft is not likely to have (they are pretty stagnant development wise). This is easily 100 times better than Roblox. If you focus on making the world building tools easy to use and modding/game design you could easily be the next big thing. Don't get too bogged down in game design other than to use it as a proof of concept to help you understand what game designers will need.

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#46

Post by Aardappel »

Aeolun wrote: post #40
Aardappel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, only the lower layers are open source right now. We will eventually expose more, when modding will more stable, etc. Right now the editor has a UI driven minimalistic language for specifying quests and other gameplay actions.

What is the voxel resolution Voxile works at? Also, does it have a single world grid? (I saw you say octree somewhere) or many separate elements?

A voxel is about 2 inches / 5cm in size.

Yes there is a single world grid, so all world objects are axis aligned and same size.

On top of that it can have floating "sprites" which are used for monsters, particles and such.

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#47

Post by Aardappel »

jfindley wrote: post #32
Aardappel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With raytracing having a far render distance is actually fairly cheap and simple compared to polygonal worlds (good looking LOD is hard). Some reasons why we don't have a super far render distance, in order of importance: The biggest is GPU memory. The octree that holds the world gets gigantic at large sizes. We'd have to swap parts out as the camera moves. We can do that but haven't gotten there. Noise: raytracing l…

Is there any way to have something like a distance blur? e.g. as rays travel further you reduce the number, subsample then apply a gaussian(or algo of choice) blur across those that return, increasing in intensity as the rays angle gets coarser? It'd be really neat to have some way of enabling really long-distance raytraced voxels so you can make planet-scale worlds look good, but as far as I'm aware noone's really n…

Yup you could blur, but it is not cheap, and it doesn't feel very satisfying to look at blurry stuff in the distance.

We have a "depth of field" implementation for when you're in dialog with an NPC. There it looks nice, because you're focused on one thing. But when looking around its not that great.

Ideally you want it close to native res in the distance, but without any wobble produced by noise as you move. This is really hard.

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#50

Post by HexDecOctBin »

Aeolun wrote: post #37
HexDecOctBin wrote: post #30

One issue with Voxel-based physics destruction games is that the physics happens in continuous space (as opposed to voxel space). This means that the moment you break off a chunk of geometry, it has to be converted into a mesh and simulated like any other mesh-based model will. This makes voxels seem like more complicated Voronoi-noise based fractures. If you want the modelling workflow or the looks of voxels, it's f…

This isn’t actually true if you use GPU raytracing, as everyone involved with voxel destruction seems to realize at one point or another. Meshing in a performant way after every destruction event is simply not possible.

So how would you do destruction physics on voxels without meshing? This is how even Teardown does it, and it uses raymarching.
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