A little background for the basis of my question. A friend of mine came up with a great idea for an addictive simple game. I have been looking at all my options and I am very interested in the idea of a voxel based game.
My main crazy question is, would it be possible or feasible to implement "portals" in a voxel engine? If not I'm assuming I could pull it off in a polygonal engine but I'm wondering if at the same time I could fake voxels? Would it also be possible to create "soft" voxels, ones that don't exactly maintain their shape. For example to behave like a water balloon, can be squished and bounce back to normal shape?
I might have some more follow questions ;D
Thanks in advance
esuvs at
Re: Crazy Voxel Engine Question
Wow, those are interesting questions. I can't say I have a firm answer but here's my opineon:
Portals ------- The first thing to realize is that there's two important aspects to portals - rendering them and simulating physics through them. In turn, there is more than one way of rendering in a voxel engine. If you render your voxel world with raycasting then you should be able to perform a transformation on the ray as it enters the portal in order to give the desired visual effect. If you use a surface extraction approach you can probably use something similar to Portal - I'd imagine this was based on render-to-texture but have never really looked into it.
As for the physics I don't really have enough experience to comment. Perhaps it would work like in a normal polygon engine but I can't say for sure...
Soft Voxels ----------- Yes, this would be possible but I don't know what the computational overhead is. Actually some soft-body physics engines perform their simulation by creating a voxel grid under the polygon mesh, deforming the voxel grid, and then updating the mesh to match. For example: http://realmatter.com
However, I don't know of any voxel engine which really supports these things. So you have a lot of programming ahead of you :-D
Maren at
"Would it also be possible to create "soft" voxels, ones that don't exactly maintain their shape. For example to behave like a water balloon, can be squished and bounce back to normal shape?"
Download VOXLAP_SRC.ZIP, run game.exe, press "T", type "/curvy=caco" without the "" and press enter 8)
Nepoc at
Thank you for the responses. I have some hope now and after doing some reading, having a combined system might be what I'm looking for.
I'll keep my eye on these forums for some ideas and suggestions as I progress.