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A question to Ken - Perimeter.

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• The LxR at 2005-12-13 05:38
  On your official site I have found some interesting information about your voxel engine - I must say, I'm impressed. One phrase caught my attention - you were saying, that it's hard to repeat dynamic terrain using polygonal engines. Perimeter, the game developer by KD-LAB, a well known Russian gamedev company and published outside Russia by Codemasters (all sites have an English version). The engine is fuly polygonal and features absolutly dynamic terrains - in fact, they the terrain as an important aspect of gameplay. Furthermore, they are now working a ne commercial Vista engine (not connected with Windows anyhow :) ), which features dynamic voxel water and superior graphic quality - http://www.kdvgames.com/eng/projects/project_view.php?id=27 (Yeah, they have two sites and work as two different companies. :) ).
  
  As you are a veteran in engine making - thanks for the build engine, I really spent a lot of time tinkering with it - I would like to ask you, whether you've seen these games before and what do you think about it? Or maybe some comments? :)
  
  Thanks for your time,
  your Russian fan,
  The LxR
• Awesoken at 2005-12-13 06:32
  I stand by my quote when I say that full freedom unlimited dynamic terrain in a polygon engine is difficult to implement. I'm not saying it isn't possible. I suspect that this company took some shortcuts and that terrain modification is actually much more limited than Voxlap. If I'm wrong, then I eat my invisible hat.
  
  I have not seen most games released in the last 8 years - there are too many out there and I just don't care anymore.
• Hazard at 2005-12-13 09:24
  Perimeter uses a simple Heightmap Landscape. That's really nothing special. You can't dig a tunnel UNDER the floor in perimeter. You're only able to move the floor up and down and this 'technique' was used in hundrets of games before and since more than 10 years.
  The difference (especially in complexity) between heightmap und volumetric landscapes seems to be really hard to understand for many people.
• The LxR at 2005-12-14 01:07
  Yeah, you're right, except for it uses 2 heightmaps instead of 1 which enables such posibilities as making a cave under the landscape. The feature will be completly implemented in the Vista Engine and the game Maelstorm. And I understand what a volumetric engine is - I just loose the trail of my thoughts a lot. ^_^
• don at 2005-12-16 00:35

  I stand by my quote when I say that full freedom unlimited dynamic terrain in a polygon engine is difficult to implement.

  I just found the following links:
  
  http://www.home.zonnet.nl/petervenis/index.htm
  http://www.btinternet.com/%7Eahcox/Cavernosa/index.html
  http://www.p0werup.de/
  
  I didn't know about that technology before... looks promising.
  So it is possible to have fully deformable terrain in a polygonal engine (ok, deformation is still not completely real-time, but I think this is solvable).
  
  But they still use voxels for the internal representation, because they are just best for volumetric data. (besides maybe metaballs)
  
  And moreover, the deformation resolution (smallest chunk you are able to remove/add) is not that great (question is, do you really need a deformation resolution like in voxlap for a game?).