Procedural block world project

sir_mud · Post by **sir_mud** » Jan 20, 2011 22:30

Advanced features are nice but they should be an option.

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 20, 2011 23:03

wow... that's beautiful... optional advanced features would be ideal... from a laptop users perspective anyway.... plus allows for a wider variety of older machines to take part in the fun as well...

guess it ain't gonna run on my android phone either then, huh? sheesh! j/k

Gonzo · Post by **Gonzo** » Jan 21, 2011 23:15

leopardpm wrote:wow... that's beautiful... optional advanced features would be ideal... from a laptop users perspective anyway.... plus allows for a wider variety of older machines to take part in the fun as well...

guess it ain't gonna run on my android phone either then, huh? sheesh! j/k

well, the way the game is constructed... i dont think low-end machines will ever be able to play it well regardless
though theres always the possibility of lowering depth range and turning off multisampling

http://dm.fwsnet.net/sidewayslightfix.PNG
still working on light, and carving was added

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 21, 2011 23:27

wow... that's some kinda mushroom!

THe entire scene looks really nice... are you sure you didn't increase the amount of visible blocks, maybe it is just the perspective, but, it sure seems like you are displaying a heck of alot more scenery compared to the beginning!

You are using OpenGL, right? Or are you doing the entire engine (raycasting) yourself?

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 22, 2011 4:33

OK, all this 'cubicness' has kinda gotten me on a mission of research over the past few days. I have pretty thoroughly explored Voxel rendering tech, Sparse Voxel Octree's, and found some interesting demos.

Gonzo: Here is a link to a page that I hope you will download and try out two demos:

The page is at : http://moonedit.com/tom/vox1_en.htm

and the two demos are:
CaveDemo
http://moonedit.com/tom/demo/cavedemo.zip

GenLand
http://moonedit.com/tom/demo/genland.zip

put the Genland stuff in the same folder as the Cavedemo stuff for it to run.

left-click to fire, find the red animated DNA strand for a better weapon.
Check out what happens if you repeatedly fire at same spot....

The main thing I wanted you to notice is in GenLand, see how many cubes he is rendering at the same time - its rather enormous! This is all done through softwre rendering, no GPUs involved and all the source code (C++) is available.

My question is: could a FreeBasic wrapper be made for this 'VoxLap' engine for us non-C programmers to play with, and, does this software help help you out in any way in your current project? I wonder if the engine could easily be changed to render a texture onto the face of the voxels instead of just a solid color? I would gather it could. But, your engine isn't just terrain, it has little objects as well which are not renderable in the engine as is (he doesn't do polygons...)

Just something to check out is all, it gets your mind working

Gonzo · Post by **Gonzo** » Jan 22, 2011 23:00

voxel is awesome yes :)

heres another, better, voxel game:
http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=201

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 23, 2011 0:01

Yeah, that is good, I don't know about 'better' though. The playfield is too small for my tastes (128x128x64) = BUT, he does have the voxel model animations pretty good as well as multiple agents - looks pretty good.... gotta think about this some more.

super_castle · Post by **super_castle** » Jan 23, 2011 11:57

and freebasic-source-code ?

gruss

Gonzo · Post by **Gonzo** » Jan 23, 2011 23:15

New update out! And, as usual it has its fair share of problems
But it shouldnt crash, unless you dare run it with a notebook :)

Changes are too many to list
Same URL as before

oh, and here is one of our "stranger" builds:

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 24, 2011 0:14

Gonzo wrote:New update out!
....
oh, and here is one of our "stranger" builds:

who is 'OUR'? you got a development team in your pocket or do you speak to invisible folks?

This looks grand! Can't wait to get on real puter as my lap ain't cuttin the mustard.... will post in a few......

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 24, 2011 0:51

oooooo You made the Leopard spotted tree trunks just for me, huh? I love you too....

Really, it looks great! I can't wait until you might show us little folks some of your code, o great one!

Make sure you provide an FPS counter somewheres on screen for us beta-testers....

It really is annoying that my laptop has probs with this... its 'only' Freebasic.... ha

Keep it up, good sir!

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 24, 2011 0:59

Hope you guys don't mind, but I am posting some of your screen shots around in different forums, hopefully to get people aware of the power that FreeBasic has and direct them here....

St_W · Post by **St_W** » Jan 24, 2011 11:56

Looks really great, but there exist some performance problems:
- Sometimes runs really slow (lags while movement)
- Sometimes hangs on exit (window disappears, but process resides still in the list of active processes)
- Construction of game environment takes a long time (environment builds itself up tile-wise)
- Application startup takes a long time (black and afterwards white game window for about 10 sec until game environment appears)

Gonzo · Post by **Gonzo** » Jan 24, 2011 17:04

St_W wrote:Looks really great, but there exist some performance problems:
- Sometimes runs really slow (lags while movement)
- Sometimes hangs on exit (window disappears, but process resides still in the list of active processes)
- Construction of game environment takes a long time (environment builds itself up tile-wise)
- Application startup takes a long time (black and afterwards white game window for about 10 sec until game environment appears)

im well aware of the performance problems (though everything is maxed out to stress the engine)
its not even supposed to work well, however, its not supposed to hang at exit
i will look into that :)
as for the startup time, it is just abit of preloading, which will be replaced with a loading screen whenever my todo list isnt 10000 items anymore
i can disable that preloading, but it will make generating all the land at the beginning very slow

leopardpm wrote:Hope you guys don't mind, but I am posting some of your screen shots around in different forums, hopefully to get people aware of the power that FreeBasic has and direct them here....

i dont really want this project to become "known" per se
i mostly just want to know how bad a certain build is, or if it works at all
if that makes any sense :)

but... if it promotes freebasic :)

edit: http://dm.fwsnet.net/floatingislands.PNG
.. and i uploaded a new version, hopefully its faster than the previous one, even if there are floating islands now too!

leopardpm · Post by **leopardpm** » Jan 25, 2011 0:22

i dont really want this project to become "known" per se
i mostly just want to know how bad a certain build is, or if it works at all
if that makes any sense :)

oh sorry... I only posted in one place so far... will remove

I know that you are doing this for your own amusement, and not to publish some sort of competing minecraft clone, I just thought that those interested in Minecraft might be influenced by your progress to either learn programming, and more particular, to learn programming in FreeBasic. The more folks, the better the community and more resources...

love the floating islands concept!

I am thinking more along the lines of a real world physics interaction, in which case blocks would normally 'fall' - but that doesn't mean that a block, or a series of connected blocks, couldn't have some 'anti-grav' blocks supporting them.... which each support a certain amount of weight (other blocks) and if removed will allow the entire structure to 'fall'. Just a thought... and a comlicated one at that.