I've checked out voxels before, but sort of strayed away from it since my C+ knowledge is not that great. However I do love the way it works, although dated when it comes to special effects I enjoy the organic feel of working with voxel art.
So I've decided to do something with Ken's interesting voxlap and accessories by creating a space ship exploration game.
Now keeping in mind the limitations of the available engine, I figured this would be the easy thing to do in it. Mostly because the demo is set for flying and well there is no gravity in space. It all works for me.
The basis of the game is that you awake aboard a space ship or station(have not decided yet) and you must escape, find food, whatever so that you survive.
Additionally I will attempt to go for as much detail as possible in designing the map. Checking out the shots below you'll see that there is more to levels than just exterior walls. The ship/station will also have service corridors between the walls and the main hull. This will allow for some nice damage effects to the structure as also seen below.
So far the actual story and reasons for why your ship is in such disrepair are up in the air. I have a number of ideas, but nothing permanent.
I've started with some test objects and maps.
Here is a bunch of samples and descriptions.
http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_shipwall00.gif The first wall I made, it has a vent that connects to the pipe. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_00.png Playing around with voxed, I'm not happy with the floor, too busy, so I replaced it later. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_01.png What the room looks like from the outside. Frames, pipes and wires. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_06.png First round of lighting tests. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_04.png Darker rooms, damage. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_05.png More damage. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_maptest_08.png Nice pull back of structure with a big sphere cut out to expose the innards.
That's what I have going on. For more information or other unrelated junk, visit my page here.
Jinroh at
Re: Experimental game
Pretty sweet looking dude. I'll check out your webpage later.
0xC0DE at
looks awesome!
Although, I do want to correct you on something; voxels aren't dated when it comes to special effects. In fact, it's mostly used for special effects. For example, killzone 2 (and alot of other next-gen shooters) uses voxels for the smoke effects.
Scott_AW at
Well yes, but for what I have to work with, special effects are limited to light burning. Which is fine by me. My only wish is that the brushes for lighting and darkening could be adjusted, as well as the new flash strength. I noticed that you do have control of the old flash, so I may end up using that more often.
Never mind that, I found that you can move it around too.
Additionally I painstakeningly eliminated all the voxels in the default map so I can have a nice empty one. Link below.
Here.
Additionally I will be uploading completed samples to be checked out in voxed/voxlap, once I complete one.
Edited by Scott_AW at
ConsistentCallsign at
Scott_AW said at Been there, done that 8)
Scott_AW at
A sample section of ship, lighted and damaged versions. Still early developement so there will be more changes and details added later.
Two .VXL files viewable in VoxEd. Here be them.
Awesoken at
Hi Scott. Nice work! It's always cool to see a new style of artwork. It looks like your map is made up mostly of KVX / KV6 based clip art. Thanks to your work, and that of Voxelstein, I know that if I am to create a new voxed someday, it would almost certainly feature KV6 pasting as its primary tool.
Scott_AW at
Currently the entire map is composed of kvx files. Mostly due to alot of overlapping that occurs. I may clean this up for some models. I can't recall why I went against using vox files, but I didn't use the kv6 because they were preshaded, and I wanted a blank palette. I kept the coloring very simple so I could rely more on enviroment shading, which aside from being voxels, it produced rather nice effects.
I think its a shame the industry has foolishly shunned voxel technology for creating a game, espicially now that we are reaching are limits with polygon graphics, as we are also excessively increasing the amount of ram computers have. Add that with what I've seen in evaldraw with its multithreading feature? We have dual and quad cores that would be best used by your engine. Alot of 3d engines, or from what I've read, have trouble going to multi-threading or at least there seems to be barriers.
tom_a_sparks at
Scott_AW said at
I think its a shame the industry has foolishly shunned voxel technology for creating a game
* Voxel rendering is no looker cool * its seen out of date * can only do 4DOF games * can only do DOOM/wolf3D games * the graphics cards are polygons rendering engines * cost of developing a video game is too high for a market flop * if voxel are being used they being used as novelty etc
Jinroh at
tom_a_sparks said at
Scott_AW said at
I think its a shame the industry has foolishly shunned voxel technology for creating a game
* Voxel rendering is no looker cool * its seen out of date * can only do 4DOF games * can only do DOOM/wolf3D games * the graphics cards are polygons rendering engines * cost of developing a video game is too high for a market flop * if voxel are being used they being used as novelty etc
Edit: Considering you had a legitimate post or two I'll go easy. You are just terribly mis-informed about voxels.
* can only do 4DOF games
::) ::) ::)
Voxlap Page said
Here are the features that Voxlap currently supports:
6 Degrees of Freedom (move anywhere, look anywhere) Room over room built-in, no hacks necessary Accurate intersections so voxels look like perfect cubes up close Fast CSG operations for: boxes, spheres, ellipsoids, cylinders, sectors, and 3D convex hulls Voxel sprites with full matrix rotation (using .KV6 output format from SLAB6) Support for sprite bending or twisting (great for animation such as a fish swimming) Full-screen Z-buffer for bug-free clipping of sprites Fog of any depth or color. Mip-mapping for both world and sprites. Support for Mercator-projection panoramas and converter for cubic panoramas (see KUBE / KUBEGL) Smooth collision detection and sliding Real-time WYSIWYG editor Real-time lighting function Support for procedural textures (wood, etc...) Includes all basic functions necessary for a game - including my own sample game code Automatically detects floating objects and makes them fall 1024x1024x256 board map (this is plenty big if you take advantage of the depth) My own optimized decompression library for PNG, JPG, GIF, TGA, BMP and ZIP files. Everything in pure 32-bit color (with emulation for 24,16,15,8 bit color) Uses modern compiler & OS: MS Visual C++ 6.0, Masm 6.15, Win95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput fully supported Optimized assembly code, supporting SSE (Pentium III) or 3DNow! (Athlon) instructions Doesn't require a 3D accelerator :)
Edited by Jinroh at
Scott_AW at
Yes...well anyways.
I've created more pieces to compose the hull and general exterior of the ship. Although the lighting doesn't translate to it, I've put together a rar with justfly, a bat to run, and sample level of the pics below. Have fun blowing it up.
This one zipped up pretty small. Less than 2 meg. Right here. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_fullstruct00.png http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_fullstruct01.png http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_fullstruct02.png http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_fullstruct03.png
New section, composed of various kvx's http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_complete_section.png
Section destroyed in JustFly http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_completedestroy.png
Starting to build a new structure, thinking a space station this time. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_modone01.png
Some more done to it. http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/scott_aw/th_modone03.png
ConsistentCallsign at
Nice 3D pixel art. But the dataset resolution is too low imo :( You can double the dimensions with the latest version of slab :3
Scott_AW at
Well I keep the resolution of the voxel objects low for two reasons.
1) Its easier to create and edit them. Alot of them are based off a single template, like the walls for example. It started with just a single vox thick 48x48 tile. I went with 48 because it took too long to detail a 64 voxel wall. At least with the amount of time I have to do these things.
2) It allows me more map space. Since I'm not hacking or editing the voxlap poly2vox code, I mean. more because I don't know how and have not the proper compilers. I hate compiling c programs. With small detailed objects I can make a really huge map were only a small one would be possible with large more detailed objects.
I haven't counted the original ships pieces to know how many voxels it is, but I can probably get a good estimate on the new one I'm making. Unless theres something to read the amount of empty vs filled voxels in a vxl file.
Edited by Scott_AW at
toasty at
Scott_AW said at
Unless theres something to read the amount of empty vs filled voxels in a vxl file.
after reading this, i quickly made a tool to count the number of solid voxels in a vxl file! i may add more features if anyone wants it. a zip is attached.
Jinroh at
New art looks pretty damn cool. So Sci-Fi! Nicely done.
Maren at
Quite refreshing, very good job 8)
Scott_AW at
I'll have to check that program out, thanks! And thanks for the comments.
The last one I released, newstruct_c has 1,316,787 solid voxels, .5% of the map.
Of course the length of the structure fills up half of the map from end to end, which is kind of why I'm leaning towards a space station or ship impaled into a moon or asteroid.
I still have lots of pieces to make, currently working on a lift structure that operates on rails. I've made a cieling lamp and in-wall vending machine recently.
Edited by Scott_AW at
Scott_AW at
Heres a space station I started, getting kind of large. I thinking of scrapping this design and making more pieces, as the hull chunks start looking less inspired the more I use them. Anyway, avoid red blaster.
Newest
Scott_AW at
New direction
I started playing around with the voxelstien engine in loading the ship levels I had made. I was happy to see that my lighting effects translated to voxelstien, of course I kind of figured they would do to the map it comes with has uses lighting.
Anyway I decided to redo all the objects, this time creating more detailed models and converting them at higher voxel counts. Prior I was using wall and floor tiles that were 48 vox units in width and heigh. Now I'll be creating 128 vox units for my tiles.
I started creating a new batch, some unconverted screen captures below:
Additionally I will be taking another shot at my dissected MakeHuman model, reseting all the points of oirigin(which I should of done) and exporting them into higher quality kv6 files to use in voxelstien's animator.
Someone on 64digits gave me the idea of when you increase the knife speed alot you have effective created a blow torch type effect. So perhaps I'll convert the knife into that.
But all thats for far later, once I get some more pieces created I'll make out a new map, one that should be playable in voxelstien without modifications. I also look forward to seeing the voxelstien engine progressing some, like having the ability to have multiple levels linked up.