Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas. Discusses Procedural Terrain, Vegetation and Architecture generation. Also OpenCL, Voxels and Computer Graphics in general.
Last weekend I took some time to add a new feature to the engine. It is some sort of mesh instancing system that brings additional detail on top of the geometry output. It can be used to add a new vegetation layer under trees, like the following images show:
I will be using it for rocks, pebbles, even man-made elements sticking out of the blocks you place.
Polygon counts are now escalating quickly because of this. My old 4770 still averages 40 FPS at 1080p but begins to struggle. It is still manageable, there are some polygons right now I can cut.
This one was long needed. I will be posting a video later so you guys can see how the LOD transitions are managed. I think this has improved a lot.
I like writing everything from scratch, but not everyone shares this form of dementia.
Many in the past have asked whether any of this would run on mainstream game engines. I could not see a reason why not. The VoxelFarm engine outputs traditional polygons, in theory it could be plugged into any engine using polygons for rendering, physics, etc. That remained a nice theory until recently. Now we have some hard proof:
This screnshot shows the VoxelFarm realtime engine providing polygons for terrain in Unity.
Here is are a video. It shows a simple physics test and a little bit of walking. The capture speed and resolution is not good, but hopefully you will get the idea.
I understand if this tech is to be widely used, it will likely come in the form of plugins for mainstream engines. So think this is very encouraging news.
Minecraft gets many things right, but the top in my list is how easy it is to create. Nothing is simpler than laying out boxes. Since everything is square (even the cows), being limited to boxes does not feel bad at all.
If you are doing some sort of sandbox environment going beyond just boxes is not trivial. One possible approach is to do like Blockscape, where in addition to the classic box you now have a large repertoire of prefixed angular shapes. I do not like this approach as it makes the interface very complex and frustrating. It makes you forehead veins pop.
So I chose a different approach, where you still lay boxes the same as in Minecraft, but then you can go back and alter them. I saw that a single operation was enough to produce both curved and straight angled surfaces. If you applied it gently you would get curves. If you applied it more, it would straighten out.
Here you can see a round hole and a needle, both initially created as boxes. It only takes a few clicks to shift their shapes:
I think this is the right direction. Still it is not simple to implement. While I got this thing working, there are many issues to fix.
I leave you with a video, let me know what you think:
