Forum archive
Voxlap
- Just thought I'd say thanks, thanks for creating a truly inspiring 3d engine, Voxlap may not be pretty, but there is something magic about 3d pixels :)
I found your engine via the Voxel page on Wikipedia, which I found after reading a tutorial on creating a voxel based terrain engine, which I read because I'm looking at creating my own 3d engine... So while I won't be using voxels, in my engine, you've still inspired me.
Anyhow, I just wanted to encourage you to work on it again, I've read that you stopped (or have done very little) in 2003. It would be a big shame to see your work go to waste.
I also wanted to share an idea about optimizing a voxel engine: Many modern polygon engines support static meshes which essentially enables the engine to store one object to render several objects. Surely this could be done with voxels?
Say you store a map as cubes of voxels, then cull of the duplicates, linking their locations back to the first cube. Then, to allow the environment to be completely destructible, when something damages a cube, a copy of the original would be made, and the damage would be applied.
I figure this would allow memory usage to be cut down ridiculously, so you have a map of 1024x1024x1024, which has a grassy floor layer, you could then divide it into parts, say 256x256x1 slabs of (65536) voxels, and only store the first instead of a giant 1024x1024x1 slab of (1048576) voxels.
Is it a good idea? And I'm sorry if you've already implemented something like this :P It would be a big shame to see your work go to waste.
I've already taken steps to avoid that by releasing the complete source code to Voxlap. So far, nobody has done much with it.Surely this could be done with voxels?
The only way to tell whether something like that is practical or not is by writing a test program. Sorry, but I have better things to do with my time.