#voxel engine

[beastinthecave]

Sooooooo I kinda accidentely made a minecraft clone....

Cant seem to figure out structure genaration though :(

[muppetdakoda]

kind of went on a really long tangent learning how to do voxel world generation!! /ᐠ. ᴗ.ᐟ\

so much trial and error xD but finally getting to a place where it makes sense in my brain. it's not quite as advanced as minecraft or anything yet but its already so cool i think c:

[litoticdev]

There's already a web-based version of an early prototype on itch.io. if anyone's curious to follow the development of Archeocook, a narrative game set in a solarpunk inspired world.

The overall pacing of this prototype is not what I have in mind for the whole game, but the epistolary format + a very basic puzzle game for balancing flavors are already there, and what I want to explore more in the coming months.

I'm hoping to make a 2-5h game, with several recipes and letters.

I often think about Ursula K. Le Guin's intro of The Left Hand of Darkness when I'm working on futuristic worlds. I've been wanting to make a game/write a story that's in the vein of what she described for quite some time.

I'll be sharing here casually about what solarpunk could mean to me, why I've been playfully using cooking and flavors as my main focus, my current experiments with Voxel Art/MagicaVoxel, Ink and Godot. I hope to write once a week, we'll see how it goes.

Thank you for playing and/or reading me!

[whomobile]

Dang I crashed (at least it looks cool)

[gamedevelopernekozero]

This is the first game I have published on itch.io. Original games were made in just 5 days; at least the first one was, but the second was made in more days because I was too ambitious. The remake features both parts in one and is now in 3D. This is the last project that I made in Godot 3.

The game features:

12 levels (6 levels each game)

9 playable planes (2 in the first game and 7 in the second game)

6 bosses (2 in the first game and 4 in the second game)

4 difficulty levels in the second game

[thon717-altcontrol]

Universal propeller

I chose to make one propeller for ease of access, you will mostly see the spinning blades, so those matter, i can size up and down the propeller anyway, so size isnt a concern

here is another angle

[scottishgames]

4J Studios Teases New Voxel-Based 'Elements' Engine

4J Studios, the Dundee studio behind the console versions of Minecraft, has released the first footage of its new voxel-based Elements Engine – with a distinctly Scottish preview of its incredible capabilities. The YouTube video takes viewers from the Dundee waterfront and the V&A to the highlands of Scotland – accompanied by Big Country’s seminal ‘In A Big Country’, showing some…

[firstpersonmusicgame]

Exporting a Magica Voxel model to Unreal

I need to be able to export my models to actually use them in my game, so in Magica Voxel there is a export menu in the bottom right I use to export the model as a .obj.

It gives me a few files, but I only need to drag the .obj file into the Content drawer to put it into my project.

From here I can drag the static mesh into the world as a prop or make it into an actor.

[zephagame]

Introducing Zepha

Hi, I'm Auri and I'm reinventing the wheel making a voxel game / engine. Recently I've managed to scrape together a really cool RGB voxel lighting algorithm so I'm going to make a post about it!

One thing that was really important to me when designing my game's lighting was that I wanted the static lighting to fit in with more fancy graphical effects. That means that Minecraft's lackluster diamond-shaped lighting wasn't going to cut it. I wanted spherical light and I wanted colors!

To accomplish this, I split the lighting into 6 channels. RGB for block light, and RGB for sky light. (technically there's 9 channels but that's too complicated to get into right now). I also store the direction that light comes from so that I can build a pseudo-sphere of light around the source.

To make things performant, I had to delve deep into micro-optimizations like Word Level Parallelism, which is a technique to do the same operation on multiple numbers packed into a single integer. The algorithm supports a huge dynamic range for colors and brightnesses, and operates in real time.

Any color can be used, and bright lights even overexpose. Lights can span chunks in radius!

If you're interested in the project, and want to see more, please join my Discord! I do weekly livestreams and I post updates often! Thanks for your interest ❤️❤️❤️

aurail.us/discord.html

[beastinthecave]

Sooooo my minecraft clone kinda turned into a 3d forager, so its like outpath but it has minecrafts building mechanics....

[canmom]

i do think like if you're not immersed in graphics and thinking about all the data flowing around between different buffers and shit that's going on inside a frame, when you see a render of a shiny box reflecting on a wall, it's like. ok and? it's a box? but there's so much nuance to the way light floods through an environment. and so much ingenuity in finding out what we can fake and precompute and approximate, to get our imaginary space to have that same gorgeous feeling of 'everything reflects off everything else'.

light is just one example, but I think all the different systems of feedback interactions in the world are just so juicy. geology is full of them. rocks bouncing up isostatically as the glaciers flow off them. spreading ridges and stripes of magnetic polarity revealing themselves. earthquakes ringing across the world. clouds forming around mountain peaks, giving rise to forests and deserts. soil being shaped by erosion, directing future water into channels. biological evolution!! I turned away from earth sciences many years ago, to pursue maths and physics and later art and now computer programming, but all of these things link up and inform the thing I'm doing at the moment.

sometimes you try to directly recreate the underlying physics, sometimes you're just finding mathematical shapes that feel similar: fractal noise that can be evaluated in parallel, pushed through various functions, assigned materials, voxellised and marching cubesed and pushed onto the gpu, shaded and offset by textures, and in the end, it looks sorta like grass. an island that will be shaped further as the players get their hands on it.

it's all just a silly game about hamsters shooting missiles. and yet when you spend this long immersed in a project, so much reveals itself. nobody will probably ever think about these details as much as I have been. and yet I hope something of that comes across.

they say of the Bevy game engine that everyone's trying to make a voxel engine or tech demo instead of an actual game. but in a way, I love that. making your own personal voxel engine is a cool game, for you.

computers are for playing with

[jovial-thunder]

Lancer Tactics devlog

I'm gonna try out posting my ~monthly devlog roundup here as well. These suckers are glorified changelogs with anecdotes and gifs galore. Let me know if this is something you like seeing show up on your dash?

Map Editor

Got units able to be placed/deleted/moved in the mission editor

Can paint/remove command zones in the editor

Can paint minecraft-like terrain blocks in the editor

Can paint/rotate multi-tile props in the editor

Can edit unit character sheets and portrait via the editor

3D maps

Did a bunch of art tests with 3D mech models, provided by GeneralChaos, which we ended up deciding not to go with to keep things simple.

To avoid the can of worms that is animation, we'd have to lean into a static "tabletop minatures" aesthetic which we decided is not a style we want to be stuck with. By sticking with 2D sprites, we avoid falling into a sort of uncanny valley; it's easier to get away with not animating a 2D sprite than it is for a 3D model.

 We also experimented with 3D terrain. We decided to make a rule that the visual style for a piece of terrain should match its mechanical effect: obstructing terrain that you can't move through, such as rocks or buildings, will be in 3D, while non-obstructing terrain like trees will stick with 2D sprites.

Hooking up the 3D camera to follow events like movement and attacks did a LOT for making it starting to feel like it's cohering into an Actual Game™

Implemented cover! And an attack preview! Cover works by aiming a ray from the target to the originator (technically to and from each voxel of each, respectively, to handle size 2s shooting above size 1 cover) and tracking all the terrain blocks it hits (how we'll handle non-terrain hard cover TBD). I think I have it working according to Perijove's cover rules manual, but I'm sure there'll be edge cases to work out. This is a case where things are significantly simplified by working in squares instead of hexes; hexes have a lot more possible weird angles you have to deal with.

Re-added what I'm stubbornly calling Combat Popcorn; little bits of text that pop out when you use abilities and attacks.

UI & game screens

Added ability for the engine to show UI that's anchored to the game world via a little word bubble line but also stay on screen as the camera moves around.

Got word bubbles working; you can now write dialogue in the mission editor, hit playtest, and see it work in a mission! (it does actually translate correctly now; this gif is just from a bug I thought was funny)

Got ability effects mostly behaving appropriately again, including muzzle flashes. The easiest way to handle them ended up being NOT billboarding them so they always face the camera (like all other 2D sprites in the game); instead, I put them on a plane parallel with the ground and just spin them around the unit to point at wherever their target is.

Did some work ironing out our tooltip system. The standard in CRPGs these days is this kind of nested labyrinth of tooltops that you see in Baldur's Gate 3:

I Did Not Want to try and figure out how to wrangle that much UI, so we're instead opting to cap the nested tooltips at the second layer. You can lock a general tooltip for e.g. an action and then mouseover various items within that tooltip to get glossary definitions...

...and then instead of having those glossary tips be lockable/mouse-overable themselves, I collect all related terms to that glossary definition and let you tab through them.

Added skin overlay functionality to the portrait maker, enabling textures like scars, tattoos, stubble, and vitiligo to be applied to just the skin and not extend off into space.

Midway through writing this update, Carpenter sent me this gif of the randomization button working! There's a still a bunch of skintones/assets missing and a few are a bit janky, but it was exciting to start seeing the range of these lil freaks (affectionate) that this editor can create.

Mourning cloak license!

This is the one I'm probably most excited about: I did a bit of a content dive and implemented a basic character sheet + all Mourning Cloak traits and equipment. They don't have fancy graphics yet, but the weapons and systems can be added via the character sheet and used in-game.

It took a little under a day, including adding soon-to-be common mechanisms like bonus damage. This is great news in that it means the engine we've been building for so long in the abstract seems to do a great job in handling comprehensive actual game content, and that it looks like we've set ourselves up for success when it comes time to buckle down on churning that out.

I'm sure other licenses will come with unique difficulties (I fear the day it comes time to do the Mule Harness // Goblin CP) but I'm feeling good about it!

Vertical slice?

Taking a step back, the pressing question on my mind has been "when will we have a playable early access build?"

I was originally hoping for Feb/March, but what we've internally been referring to as the "3D cataclysm" has pushed everything back by at least three months, so the target for the first alpha build is now in May. So, ah, thanks for your patience! Seeing things come together, I've become more and more convinced that moving to 3D was the right call.

[bobacupcake]

Not sure if it is anything special but I love love the style of journey and sky children of the light, do they use any shaders in specific?

did a pretty deep dive into the sparkly sand of journey but hooo boy sky children of the light

this is my shader white whale . some day i want to know how they do this. holding out for their incredibly talented graphics engineer john edwards to do a gdc talk or something on them like he did for the sand in journey. this game runs on phones!!!! its a mobile game!!!!!!!!

all i know is that journey uses something called "blobs" to do the terrain and clouds , which i imagine is some kind of SDF/voxel rendering, meaning instead of making a sphere out of triangles/quads like most games do, they would just say "hey, put a sphere here" and it is a perfect sphere because you can use math to find where the sphere starts/stops.. like here's a simplified example in 2d, where the left is what most render engines do building things out of triangles/quads (or in this case lines), and right, what sdf engines do

so anyways having these things be SDF lets you do a ton of stuff you wouldnt be able to do like smooth noise displacement and fancy lighting calculations (though i imagine a lot of the lighting is baked ahead of time. this game runs on a phone !!!!! but also this game has a day/night/weather cycle so actually it might be realtime ?!?) if it is run ahead of time the lighting setup is probably run in a very similar way to how Actual clouds are rendered and mapped to the clouds in some way (through a texture? through the vertex color? this thing is a SDF does it even have vertex colors? maybe a point cloud generated from the SDF?) and if its realtime. then they either found a very fast way to do that lighting calculation with the SDFs or they found something that approximates it very well

and then for the surface of the clouds.. my best guesses is they are using a noise to wiggle around the surface of the SDF in a way that makes it look all fluffy and cloudy, or they are using some kind of particle system to add extra little bits of SDF to the surface of the clouds. or both!!! maybe they do one for close-up and one for far.. i dont know!!! i want to learn so bad though. it is such a pretty game

[runwayrunway]

Miss Conenginality: Short SC.7 Skyvan

When researching for my post about the ancestors of British Airways I learned a lot I hadn't known before. Most of this was about logos and liveries, but some of it involved British European Airways' varied and eclectic fleet. One of the planes I hadn't known they operated is a plane that I adore for being, simply put, shaped.

image: Hugh W. Cowin Aviation Collection

The website I took this image of an SC.7 in BEA's 'Speedjack' livery from described it as having a 'sleek design and powerful engines'. While its turboprop engines are indeed pretty powerful for a plane of this size, 'sleek' is surely not a word I would use to describe a plane colloquially known as the 'flying shoebox'.

This...creature, which consistently gets an emphatic 'no way that's a real airplane' when I show it to people, flew for BEA's Scottish division. Red wings and all...I guess this is the shoebox they kept the Louboutins in.

The Skyvan, which with a height of 4.6 meters and length of 12.21 meters is one third as tall as it is long, is the brainchild of Shorts Brothers, best known for their pre-1950s flying boat designs. This may explain why the bottom half looks a bit like a DUKW.

This is the same thing. Unfortunately there was an accident involving a failed ditching of a Shorts 360, a stretched derivative of the Skyvan, suggesting they are not particularly seaworthy, but to be fair DUKWs aren't either.

149 of these delightfully pointy-nosed voxel-based planes were built between 1963 and 1986, seeing both civil and military use carrying cargo or up to 19 passengers. These days they're mostly used for skydiving, with around 35 still in service.

I have seen nothing at all to suggest that these aren't good planes. If you want a sturdy cargo or skydiving plane to use from short, poorly paved runways this may be a good choice for you. She's doing hard work, and I respect that. But...like, this is genuinely among the goofiest planes out there.

Shorts did make two stretched versions, the 330 and 360 (plus military derivatives of these), which were meant as regional airliners. These planes are also immensely goofy but just don't compare to the flying shoebox. They have actual elongated noses rather than a little flat nubbin with a cone stuck on the end, and they are far curvier, almost resembling an actual airplane. The 360 even has a relatively normal-looking empennage instead of the twin fins. These are still very silly but far easier to take seriously.

This is a square with rectangles attached, and it flies somehow. This is very silly, and I love her.