Voxel-engine

[Nr.56]

I wonder why a console without hardware 3d accelerator do not take advantage of the invention of the early nineties, the voxel-space-engine. there are a lot of free engines (of course most of it for x86) and some freeware games, like this game of a russian team for PPC. maybe a shooter or a comanche-clone could be possible on a 200MHz arm. :rolleyes:

 

[PokeParadox]

I tried to write a voxel engine, a few yearsback and failed :lol: I found a nice link here:
http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

I would like to try again but I should be doing my AI coursework... hmm :S

 

[Trip]

Is this the same?
I'm not a programmer, but still interested in the different technologies

 

[PokeParadox]

Yeah it's the same technology/idea.
Basically using Squares/cubes to make up detailed 3D space. Take a look at the demos on Ken Silvarman's site to get a feel for things(link in my previous post))
One thing to note in the demo is destructive environments

 

[Trip]

Yeah it's the same technology/idea.

Cool, then maybe this tutorial will be useful for some one.

 

[Nr.56]

I know the engine of Ken Silverman, but i thought this is much to heavy for the gp2x.
The engine of the tutorial of Tripmonkey´s link without filtering and so on could be the right one. The source is open. Maybe Poke can take a look? Compilable?

 

[evol]

i think this one is made with mobile phones in mind
Edit: it seems it uses DDraw calls so win32 but the overall idea seems solid have a peek

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/fcarticles.cgi?show=64007

 

[PokeParadox]

I know the engine of Ken Silverman, but i thought this is much to heavy for the gp2x.
The engine of the tutorial of Tripmonkey´s link without filtering and so on could be the right one. The source is open. Maybe Poke can take a look? Compilable?

I did have a quick scan over the code. It has Windows.h and maybe some other things that are not directly portable to the GP2X. I will have a proper go at porting it at some point (probably over the summer). But right now AI and Atrox are my coding priorities...

I'll take a quick look at that Evol, thanks.

 

[rokdcasbah]

voxlap is a full voxel engine and yeah, it's probably too much for the gp2x. but a heightfield engine would be cool. there's at at least two demos that contain them. i ported newvox but didn't release it for various reasons (mostly laziness). it rendered at a decent speed though, once i used a LUT for the trig. plus it would have been kind of a pointless release.

anyhoo...hal9000 is working on one as we speak.

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=36442

 

[rokdcasbah]

Is this the same?
I'm not a programmer, but still interested in the different technologies



voxel is kind of misused in this context. here's a more relevant wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heightfield

here's another minimal heightfield tutorial: http://www.flipcode.com/articles/voxelland_part02.shtml

a couple talking points:
- a full voxel engine would allow for any object to be rendered in 3d. a heightmap, though, is much more feasible for real-time rendering, especially on the gp2x.
- there's obviously different ways to do it, and a compromise has to be made between speed and quality. for instance, how do you light it? just make taller "voxels" lighter than lower ones? that's usually done. also you can use an image map, which gives you some more possibilities. or you could even calculate the average normal of, say, a 5x5 grid and light it based on that.