voxelTerrain2 - screenys - vid - source

[qwertzui11]

Hey guys

site with source and documentation:
http://voxelterrain.com/

examples
https://github.com/qwertzui11/voxelTerrain/releases

screenies

http://voxelterrain.com/voxel_primitive.png
http://voxelterrain.com/voxel_primitive_wire.png
http://voxelterrain.com/voxel_noise.png

vid (the lags occur because of the video-recording-software; without it works fluently )
[youtube]stqgZTws_Z8[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stqgZTws_Z8

For the last weeks I was doing a reimplemtation of my voxelTerrain ( http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=68450 ).
Now it comes with the following features:
- surface with marching-cubes
- everything is async and gets done in background (optional all serial and in foreground)
- lod with transvoxel
- physics
- sync in various forms (file, network, db)
- bzip2 compression for sync
- highly threaded (CPU using boost::thread && boost::asio)
- paging
- voxel-on-demand
- serialization

The goal was to implement a highspeed implementation for very large, fully editable terrain.

Have fun
Markus

[drwbns]

Very cool looking, I'll give it a test run when I can. What type of paging is implemented? Does this depend on any Ogre interfaces?

[qwertzui11]

1) would be happy about any testing.
2) demand paging
3) nope. Depends on boost::thread, boost::asio, boost::system, boost::serialization, boost::io_streams and boost::file_system - for profiling boost::chrono and for logging boost::date_time. ofc there's a small layer for creating ogre3d hardwareBuffer/mesh/entity/node and a small bullet layer for the physics-collisionObject(s). And it depends on some C++11 features (enum class, constexpr)

Tested compilers are gcc 4.7.0, 4.7.2, 4.7.3 and mingw32 4.7.2. Crosscompiling with mingw32 was easier than i thought, even compiling boost from source with mingw32 was quite easy.

Have fun
Markus

[Jabberwocky]

Great screenshot, cool stuff!

[qwertzui11]

updated the first post with a youtube-video.

Have fun
Markus

[qwertzui11]

added a release-build for linux64. Successfully tested on Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 (LTS), Ubuntu 13.04 amd64 and Fedora. Please checkout the "dependencies" file before running ./start.

Have fun
Markus

[drwbns]

Do you have plans to release the source or keep it closed source?

[drwbns]

I tested it, and it was running good until someone else joined. We were shooting balls at each other and then my client crashed good fun though

[qwertzui11]

Do you have plans to release the source or keep it closed source?

definitly OS under a liberal license. However I'm still testing - sometimes it still has A-bugs, as u already recognised
It seems like ur from west-US? did u feel any latency?

[drwbns]

Yeah, there was some latency, I think a little more latency after you ( or someone else ) joined and was firing balls also. I'm on a pretty decent cable connection which is probably faster than the average user but it was still playable

[qwertzui11]

Agree, the network component which updates transforms of "moveables" needs some improvement

thx 4 ur feedback
Have fun
Markus

[Xypher]

Any chance we can get preview source with said liberal license?
Your work is amazing!

[qwertzui11]

thx.
I really should speed up my publishing. This time I wanna do the commenting and documentation before releasing the src

Markus

[cloud]

In the switch between lods I 'think' I noticed the vertices jumping, so my question, are you actually interpolating position of low lod vertex positions based on a high lod resolution grid? or do you have 2 grids effectively, cause you can get a nicer look if you just interpolate the high lod, if indeed thats not what your doing.

[nevarim]

great work

[qwertzui11]

In the switch between lods I 'think' I noticed the vertices jumping, so my question, are you actually interpolating position of low lod vertex positions based on a high lod resolution grid? or do you have 2 grids effectively, cause you can get a nicer look if you just interpolate the high lod, if indeed thats not what your doing.

Yes ur right, when the camera is away far enough, the lod simply jumps to a higher one. Thx for the tip, I'll look into that. Got a nice link, for a good algorithm?

great work

Thx! Always motivating

Have fun
Markus

[qwertzui11]

Hi all

I finally found the time to refactor my second version of the voxel terrain and push it to github:
https://github.com/qwertzui11/voxelTerrain

Checkout this simple example of how to use the library. It uses 4 threads for a for a large editable voxel-terrain. (needs boost, ogre3d and ois)
https://github.com/qwertzui11/voxelTerr ... n.cpp#L192

In the next days I wanna comment the classes, create a doxygen-doc and create an "edit" for "waterthight-mesh to voxel".

Tested compilers are gcc-4.7.2, gcc-4.8.1, mingw-4.8 and clang-3.4.

Any feedback would be appreciated
Markus

[nevarim]

thanks for your work

just for to know you never think to add a class for to create a line point to point and add voxel on that line? (for create bridge of terrain between canyon)

ill test voxe soon

Neva

[mkultra333]

Looks very interesting. What's the license? The github license page just says "// TODO"

[qwertzui11]

Looks very interesting. What's the license? The github license page just says "// TODO"

not sure yet, but will be something liberal.

After one coffee pot I managed to write a simple algorithm for "mesh to voxel". The difficult part has been, generating some nice interpolation values, without using expensive primitve interpolation-algos.
The performance is O(triangle-count) for initialisation (rTree-building) and O(numVoxel) for voxelCreation(multi-threaded).

The screenshots renders the result and the input-mesh (white), lying above each other; so u can see the results of the interpolation.
once without interpolation:

http://voxel.markus-lanner.com/r/mesh-t ... lation.png

http://voxel.markus-lanner.com/r/mesh-to-voxel.png

Have fun
Markus

// edit: fixed performance

[drwbns]

Any plans to add mesh extraction? This could be really useful for a 3d world editor if the size and shape of the input can be changed.

[qwertzui11]

in my opinion creating tools to create worlds r a lot of (difficult) work. Their would have to be a lot of brushes, sugar and support. I suggest using a 3d-tool like blender to create ur world and import it afterwards as mesh->voxel to ur game.

Have fun

[qwertzui11]

Hey.

Added the feature "custom voxels" which makes it possible to add any information to a voxel.
In the following example, I added a colour-value to each voxel and rendered it as ambient/diffuse colour.


http://voxel.markus-lanner.com/r/voxel- ... terial.png

Have fun
Markus

[qwertzui11]

I finally found the spare time to a documentation for this lib.
http://voxelterrain.com

Any feedback is welcome
Have fun
Markus

[xelon]

I finally found the spare time to a documentation for this lib.
http://voxelterrain.com

Any feedback is welcome
Have fun
Markus

Is there any limits on the LOD number? I see you used 3 on your examples. What are the cons of using more LODS?
Also is the paging infinite? will it allow for "almost" infinite worlds?