This is my first post, but I've been a member here for over a year. I'm a voxel fan, and this seems to be the only place where people discuss voxel development that I could find anyway.
My main interest is voxel terrain development, and I put together a little demo of my work so far, if you want to take a look.
[link no longer active]
It's written in C with OpenGL and GLFW. Key control is documented on-screen.
For my latest game, I went with regular triangle meshes with LOD built on a quad-tree structure. It's working, but I really want to produce a game with voxel terrain. Is anyone here working on terrain in particular? My goal is something like Delta Force 2, but improved. I know that NovaLogic's methods are patented, but does that stop someone from coming up with something that looks the same or better? Should I be using OpenGL? How do I get my terrain to go further out on the horizon?
Thanks.
Gordon
Edited by Awesoken at
ConsistentCallsign at
Re: Voxel terrain
The terrain must be deformable.
Edited by TheodoreRobertCowell at
Jinroh at
gordon said at
hello,
This is my first post, but I've been a member here for over a year. I'm a voxel fan, and this seems to be the only place where people discuss voxel development that I could find anyway.
My main interest is voxel terrain development, and I put together a little demo of my work so far, if you want to take a look.
http://www.mediafire.com/?vdb3ymjwzo2
It's written in C with OpenGL and GLFW. Key control is documented on-screen.
For my latest game, I went with regular triangle meshes with LOD built on a quad-tree structure. It's working, but I really want to produce a game with voxel terrain. Is anyone here working on terrain in particular? My goal is something like Delta Force 2, but improved. I know that NovaLogic's methods are patented, but does that stop someone from coming up with something that looks the same or better? Thanks.
Gordon
Novalogic has used Voxels since Comanche and many many people have cloned their style. Andre' Lamothe, Ken, and thousands of others. Producing similar results to theirs won't get you in trouble. Ripping their code would, but not producing a similar rendering style.
Should I be using OpenGL?
Assuming OpenGL has a line primitive like DirectX you could use OpenGL to just throw an entire vertical line at the renderer to draw your terrain as opposed to drawing it pixel by pixel.
How do I get my terrain to go further out on the horizon?
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I'm going to assume Draw Distance. You could have your rays cast further which would theoretically give you more drawn terrain.
TheodoreRobertCowell said at
The terrain must be deformable.
Yes, this would be relatively easy, and you could add a few maps on top of each other for overhanging geometry and things. Additionally you need to add realtime lighting of some kind. Even if it's just Ambient and Directional. This would help the visual quality.
Hope this helps.
gordon at
Thanks Jinroh. My terrain ends abruptly at a too-short distance from the camera. I want it to go on indefinitely, but that just means more stepping along each ray, and slower performance the further I go. Is that just the way it is with voxel terrain? I'm trying some interlacing techniques, but the rendering gets very bad looking out in the distance. Am I on the right track to use an interlacing technique? Should I just continue until I have tuned it just right? What other techniques might I try? Limited deformation won't be difficult, but I haven't tried real-time lighting yet. Thanks for the tips.
ConsistentCallsign at
gordon said at
My terrain ends abruptly at a too-short distance from the camera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE 8)
Jinroh at
What I learned from reading and trying some things is that you cast rays for the expanse of the terrain, and only draw them if some part of the vertical strips is above the previous one you drew. That way you can draw from front-to-back with no overdraw.
As long as you just add to extend the rays and not calculate Sin & Cos every frame you should be fine speedwise as long as your terrain is not hugely huge. THEN you may want to specify a draw distance of like 1024 or something to make sure you don't draw waaaay too far out when it wouldn't even make sense to draw at that distance anyway. Then you can just add fog in the distance to hide that stuff that you could see past the draw distance.