Fully Destructible Levels - New website and domain!

[PolyVox]

***** Update for November 2009 *****
Hi all, it's me again. I just wanted to share with you the latest updates to my project.

Firstly, I have decided to switch to the zlib license. This is much more permissive that the GPL which I was using previously, and allows commercial use amoung other things. I have updated SVN with the new license and will do the website when I get a chance.

Secondly, I have been preparing a new demo which will accompany an article I have been writing about voxel-based game engines. I would therefore like to invite people to test it just to make sure it works on other computers. It demonstrates very basic editing of voxel based terrain. Please read the readme file for instructions.

You can download the demo here: Terrain Editor Demo
If it won't run you might need this: Visual C++ Redist

And now the obligatory screenshot of the terrain editing in action:




Hope you like it!
***** End of November 2009 Update *****

[PolyVox]

Anyway, the holes are too 'perfect'. Any chance we could see some shots of some less perfect holes?

Sorry, I never answered this! Other shapes are of course possible... but it's just easier making spheres because I can just check whether voxels are with a certain distance of the destruction point. But eventually I aim to allow arbitrary (user-defined) meshes to be used as a shape - both for creating material and destroying it.

[sinbad]

Nice! Were you influenced by our switch to MIT at all?

Demo worked great for me. Is there a way to get a wireframe view?

[PolyVox]

Nice! Were you influenced by our switch to MIT at all?

It reminded me that I was planning to do it at some point. I once had ideas about being able to dual license between GPL and commercial, but it's so far from being finished that I decided it would be more useful to promote my name by spreading the software as far as I can. Hence the more permissive license.

Demo worked great for me. Is there a way to get a wireframe view?

Only by editing 'Thermite\share\thermite\apps\TechDemo\materials\scripts\TriplanarTexture.material' and adding 'polygon_mode wireframe' into the main pass. I should add a keyboard shortcut for it though. But the triangles are so small it almost looks like solid rendering. I do have a chunked LOD system but it is disabled for this demo because of the cracks between patches (which are much harder to solve in 3D than for a 2D heightmap). I'm currently investigating progressive LOD as an alternative.

The volume in the demo is 512x512x256 voxels which is a lot of triangles!

[akem321]

very cool, good job!

[xadhoom]

Hey PolyVox!

Nice demo! Works great on my machine (XP-Laptop with a QuadroFX1500).

One thing: It seems that the normal calculation is wrong at certain edges. If you dig a hole through the ground the lower most vertices are brighter than the neighbours at the bottom edge.

xad

[calsmurf2904]

Works here, low fps though. (Intel GMA x3100 graphics card explains it )

[PolyVox]

Thanks for testing guys, I'm glad it works and you like it

One thing: It seems that the normal calculation is wrong at certain edges. If you dig a hole through the ground the lower most vertices are brighter than the neighbours at the bottom edge.

Yes, actually you are right. The normals are computed directly from the voxel data by looking at the neighbouring voxels. Therefore the edges are a special case because there may not be any neighbouring voxels available. I will have to think about this, maybe I can make it less obvious.

[ecoumans]

***** Update for November 2009 *****
Hi all, it's me again. I just wanted to share with you the latest updates to my project.

Firstly, I have decided to switch to the zlib license. This is much more permissive that the GPL which I was using previously, and allows commercial use amoung other things. I have updated SVN with the new license and will do the website when I get a chance.

Great news. Do you remember we discussed switching to the zlib license GDC Austin in 2008?
I'm glad you chose a BSD/MIT/Zlib style license for polyvox, just like Ogre, Bullet, Box2D etc.

I'll try out your demo, can you let us know when/where you plan publishing this article?
Erwin
http://bulletphysics.org

[PolyVox]

Hey Erwin,

Sure, I remember that, GDC 2008 was a great experience for me. I think the license change is a good move and will help boost interest in the library (at least when it is more finished) so I'm glad I finally got around to it.

The new demo doesn't feature any physics, unfortunatly. The Bullet code is still in there but needs reviving, and the article (which will appear in a book called Game Engine Gems out next year) focuses mostly on the rendering side of things. The most recent physics demo is the one with the castle and the bouncing cubes and spheres which you will have seen already.

If you are interested in physics with voxels you should also check out the videos for the Atomontage engine as I believe they do physics on the actual voxel data rather than an extracted mesh. There's no playable demo so it's hard to say if it really works, but the vehicle and particles video is particularly nice, and in the 'game scene' video you can actually see the truck leaving tire tracks in the voxel data

[Brano]

If you are interested in physics with voxels you should also check out the videos for the Atomontage engine as I believe they do physics on the actual voxel data rather than an extracted mesh. There's no playable demo so it's hard to say if it really works, but the vehicle and particles video is particularly nice, and in the 'game scene' video you can actually see the truck leaving tire tracks in the voxel data

Hello and thanks! You're right, my physics engine works directly with voxels, but it also works with usual collision primitives for polygon-mesh based objects - like the vehicles in the newest videos. There are much nicer wheel tracks in the newest video than in the one with the truck. Hope you enjoy it!

Brano/Atomontage

[PolyVox]

Hello and thanks! You're right, my physics engine works directly with voxels, but it also works with usual collision primitives for polygon-mesh based objects - like the vehicles in the newest videos. There are much nicer wheel tracks in the newest video than in the one with the truck. Hope you enjoy it!

Brano/Atomontage

Sounds good, though i won't be able to look at the video for a few weeks as I am away travelling. Do you plan to release a playable demo at some point? I'm always a little skeptical of videos with no demo (same for the GigaVoxels project) because until you try it it is hard to know what the limitations really are. But your project does look really cool, and I hope it does work as well as you say. Out of curiousity, how big are your voxel environments?

[PolyVox]

***** Update: Now in Game Engine Gems 1 *****
Hey all,

I just wanted to let you know that the new book 'Game Engine Gems 1' features a chapter about the Thermite3D engine as described in this thread. The chapter (titled 'Volumetric Representation of Virtual Environments') is written by myself and covers storage of the voxels, the surface extraction, and the rendering process. Anyone interested in this technology should check it out!

You can find out more about the book at http://www.gameenginegems.com/

The chapter does mention Ogre, but only in passing as it is written in a largely API and engine independent way. But I hope it will help spread the word!

[Entropai]

Wow, let me be the first one to congratulate you . Just hope i have time to check the article later on, been waiting for to test drive your engine for an idea that i have.

[sinbad]

Congratulations on the article!

[Rambus]

Congratulation on getting published- I'll be placing an order

Edit: Will the book be available anywhere else? I was placing an order but don't like the idea of purchasing an item where the shipping charges are not shown to me in advance.

[PolyVox]

Wow, let me be the first one to congratulate you . Just hope i have time to check the article later on, been waiting for to test drive your engine for an idea that i have.

Great, well in about one month I intend to start adding scripting support (probably via QtScript). It will then be a lot easier to actually use the engine in projects.

Edit: Will the book be available anywhere else? I was placing an order but don't like the idea of purchasing an item where the shipping charges are not shown to me in advance.

It's available on Amazon for pre-order, and it looks like it is going to be cheaper there: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Gems- ... 763778885/.

On the UK version of Amazon you get free shipping on items over £15 - I don't know if it is the same on all their sites.

[Rambus]

Thank you, I'll place the order on Amazon

My problem isn't having to pay for shipping changes, its the fact they are not upfront about them. Makes me think that the charges are going to be huge.

[Sslaxx]

Thank you, I'll place the order on Amazon

My problem isn't having to pay for shipping changes, its the fact they are not upfront about them. Makes me think that the charges are going to be huge.

Yeah, might see if I can get the .com to ship this to the UK if I can afford it, because the UK site's price is the same as the full price on the US site. Even if the shipping charges are the difference, still would be a saving (if I can afford the book in the first place!).

[jacmoe]

How much work would it be to turn this into a voxel terrain system?

The reason why I'm asking is because I thought it would be cool to have this in Ogre:
http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Editing_Terrain

[PolyVox]

It's almost exactly the same technology In fact, the author of that 3D engine is Eric Lengyel, who is also the editor of 'Game Engine Gems 1' where I published my article a few months ago.

My system is broken into two parts - the PolyVox library which manges the voxels and generates the surface mesh, and the Thermite3D engine which is a game engine built on the library and using Ogre for rendering.

The PolyVox library is already quite usable and can be incorperated into other engines. It's certainly not finished, but for example it has been integrated into the [w]tech engine as a terrain editor similar in concept to the C4 one. And the demo/screenshots at the top of this page show that Thermite3D is basically capable - it just needs a lot of user interface work for sculpting/smoothing tools, etc.

It's worth noting that I originally implemented this project as an Ogre SceneManager, before deciding it would be more useful to more people if it were a standalone library with no dependancies. But as you see in my demos, it still integrates with Ogre nicely, and it would be possible to write a SceneManager which builds on it.

[jacmoe]

Wow, some impressive [W]Tech screenshots!
I know that the C4 author is behind Game Gems, and I know that the tech is very similar, which is why I asked.

I think a new voxel based Terrain component powered by PolyVox would be extremely cool.

[jacmoe]

Just a small question: Is triplanar texture mapping part of PolyVox ?

[PolyVox]

I think a new voxel based Terrain component powered by PolyVox would be extremely cool.

Yeah, it would be nice, but I'm not planning to implement it myself. In Thermite I'm using the default scene manager - PolyVox generates the final mesh as a number of regions and I just create a SceneNode (via hardware buffers, but ManualObject would also work) for each and add it to the SceneManager. I'm not sure what advantages I would get from a custom/dedicated scenemanager, but I haven't really looked into it.

Just a small question: Is triplanar texture mapping part of PolyVox ?

No, but it is in Thermite. It's not in PolyVox for a couple of resons. Firstly it's not the only way of applying textures to voxels, for example it looks good on terrain but I also have a voxel model of the Earth which I texture by sampling a cubemap (from NASA data) according to the surface normal. Secondly PolyVox doesn't deal with shaders/OpenGL/Direct3D. It just provides the storage of the volumes and an algorithm to extract the surface.

[jacmoe]

Thanks!
No, I wasn't thinking of a dedicated scene manager - I'll take a peek at Thermite.
Sounds like it features what I'm looking for.