Cubiquity voxel engine

[Lelue]

Hey, this Looks really awesome and When we want to Build a bombed City like Dresden '45 we could use this to destroy the houses, is there a Way to Convert the unity3d Version back to vxl . ?

[David Williams]

is there a Way to Convert the unity3d Version back to vxl . ?

Unfortunately not. At some point we'll probably allow users to import/export their data as image slices (see here) because it's independent of any particular engine, but we haven't properly implemented that yet.

[Jdrew]

cool

[Lelue]

mh... couldnt you script something to convert it back?

[David Williams]

Oh, yes, it would be possible it's just not implemented yet. For testing purposes was more important to get data into the engine rather than out of it. Eventually it would be nice to have both import and export options, so that it can be used with other level design tools.

[Lelue]

that would be awesome thanks david

[Influx]

Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads.

Pretty fun to mess about in, nice work. Are you going to try and implement some sort of climbing feature so the tank can smoothly go over, say, a 1 voxel height increase?

Also, if you're going to work on unsupported voxels collapsing, a game that does that well is A New Zero, particularly this version which is a tank demo. A video showing it in action, and also how it's done, is shown in the video in this blog post.

I hope you find some of these resources helpful!

[David Williams]

Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads.

Pretty fun to mess about in, nice work. Are you going to try and implement some sort of climbing feature so the tank can smoothly go over, say, a 1 voxel height increase?

So far I'm mostly focused on the engine rather than the game, so I haven't worried too much about these kinds of physics glitches. But yes, eventually I need to fix this. Or maybe I'll switch to a human character for the demo, or even an aerial vehicle? I'm not sure yet...

Also, if you're going to work on unsupported voxels collapsing, a game that does that well is A New Zero, particularly this version which is a tank demo. A video showing it in action, and also how it's done, is shown in the video in this blog post.

Wow, that's cool! Looks like they have a nice method for deciding what should collapse (not just voxels directly above), and I really like the smoke effect. I should take some inspiration from this :-)

[learn_more]

no more updates?

[David Williams]

no more updates?

Nothing too exciting, though a new version of Unity was released which now supports shadows for free. So I was able to test shadows with the voxel world:



Overall though I'm working to make an early release of the Unity addon in the coming weeks. We're planning to host the code publically in BitBucket so that anyone can use it for free, but a license will be required to use volumes larger than 256x256x256. So the free version won't load Build and Shoot maps (they are too large) but you will be able to use it to make smaller voxel-based games.

[Jdrew]

Why would that be?

[learn_more]

to make money :)

[David Williams]

The aim is indeed to make some money from this project, and providing both free and paid versions seems like a good way to approach that. We benefit from some free publicity and testing while users get to make sure that the system does everything they need before buying.

The choice of 256x256x256 as an upper limit on the free version is pretty arbitrary... it needs to be big enough to be able to make real games but also small enough that the paid version can go significantly higher. That figure seemed about right but it could change once we establish just how big the system can go.

[Jdrew]

How do you suppose users will be able to make smaller maps?

[David Williams]

I think map creation is a problem for voxel-based games regardless of the map size. We'll create a basic editor inside Unity but I'm not sure if people want to create maps that way in practice (it probably depends on the type of game). For Voxeliens we used procedural generation which is quite popular, otherwise there's options like importing from a heightmap or voxelizing a mesh.

I expect we'll have to make some tools for some of the above tasks, and I expect we can just give these away for free separate from the Unity stuff. But first the main engine has to be beaten into shape :-)