Adding SNOW and MODEL IMPORTS [Voxel Devlog #10]

[@dottedboxguy]

it's very nice to see that voxel engine devs are teaming up in order to build greater things !

[@quantumdeveloper2733]

The snow looks really good. To prevent the client snow from suddenly disappearing when it hits the ground you could keep the client snow on the ground for a short period, slowly melting it (basically transitioning the color to the ground color while making it disappear into the ground).

[@ChezSwiiz]

You might also render the snow generated by the server as falling on client before rendering it on the ground for an even better effect! Nice video as always!

[@clonkex]

KZbin why did you stop recommending me these amazing videos!! Dang, this engine is going to be an absolutely perfect resume if you ever want a job in the games industry. I have some very old voxel projects and other small, unfinished things, but I've screwed myself a little by never really finishing anything. Hopefully my current project can fill that requirement even if it doesn't succeed as its own game.

[@Teflora]

awesome progress! An idea for the snow: if it's deterministic where the snow lands, you could have the client side particles stay on the ground and wait until the next server update to make them more seamless fit into the world! Excited to see the next update

[@hikerwolfspaine8200]

I thought the same thing. If you just have a shared seed then you can figure out where snow needs to fall client side.

[@TheDroidsb]

Also I’d love to see a video Timelapse of snow accumulating

[@GabeRundlett]

This!!!

[@TheDroidsb]

Heck yea new Douglas video. This series has me so excited 😂

[@netcore10]

WOOO Let's go Douglas! You got this. Nice work!

[@dominikamann1872]

That is almost exactly what I need for my own game. Greate work!

[@divinehazrd]

Very impressive work Doug!

[@UnofficialFoneE]

Amazing progress! Teamwork makes the dreamwork. :)

[@ttj_]

another great video douglas. great job so far! and your videos are incredibly well edited and your sound is perfect!

[@grevel1376]

Incredible, you inspired me to learn wgpu. I started working on my first project. It's about procedural mesh generator with some ui controls. I plan to implement fractal terrain and hydraulic erosion.

[@DouglasDwyer]

That sounds fantastic! If you ever complete your project, feel free to post a KZbin video of it - I would love to see it :)

[@nellfs]

Very cool Douglas, good work!

[@ArachnidAbby]

I might try learning some rust so I can bodge in a "gun". I want to create little tiny bullet holes in those 16x models

[@DouglasDwyer]

When the engine is more mature, I want to support a fully-fledged modding system to allow people to add whatever custom content that they'd like!

[@ArachnidAbby]

@@DouglasDwyer sounds awesome cant wait! I may try to make mods once that support comes out. I've already got my own big project rn lol so i gotta see how much time i have once modding support is added to your engine. Also, i love your videos and engine. Have a great day!

[@thomasmcbride2287]

Excellent video!

[@sjoerdev]

you guys are amazing!

[@lunatikreal1384]

Great job, it's getting more interesting than minecraft. Physics is generally cool.

[@allesbanane2329]

Great work :) I got a question for you: are you using OpenGL or Vulkan for rendering? and if u are using Vulkan are you using "Ash" or "Vulkano" or some other crate?

[@DouglasDwyer]

As my voxel engine targets both native and browsers, I am forced to use OpenGL. I use the glow crate for OpenGL bindings, since it's WASM compatible. I would love to use a more modern API, and all of the features included - but when supporting the web, you take what you can get :)

[@gaborkrisko]

It would be nice to have the framerate displayed in FPS as well

[@dominicstocker5144]

And maybe as a graph

[@OwenWithAHammer]

Does your engine compress redundant voxels/polys? So, if a large flat white object where made, you could represent that with thousands of polys/cubes, or compress it into one voxel and two triangles.

[@DouglasDwyer]

There are two answers to this question, regarding voxel compression and polygon compression. My engine internally stores the voxels themselves, and converts them to triangles only for rendering. In both cases, there are forms of compression utilized! When storing voxels, I employ a data structure called a sparse voxel octree, which allows me to process voxel data in large, homogenous chunks. When drawing voxels, I use a greedy meshing algorithm which merges adjacent faces, reducing triangle count.

[@williamist]

very nice!

[@Gwilo]

damn good intro

[@kras_mazov]

Will there be colored light sources? Lighting can make a huge difference when using simplistic graphics.

[@DouglasDwyer]

Yes, when I get back to doing more graphics-related tasks, I would absolutely love to add point lights supporting arbitrary colors!

[@bytesandbikes]

Really great looking! 😊 Could the model import use a pixel art style scaler? Might show off the smaller voxels nicelyc

[@DouglasDwyer]

I'm glad to hear that you like it! Could you point me to an example of a pixel art-style scaler? I confess I'm not quite sure what you mean.

[@dxred2553]

@@DouglasDwyer They could be talking about scalers designed for pixel art upscaling like hqnx, Wikipedia has a pretty good list (Pixel-art scaling algorithms)

[@GabeRundlett]

@@dxred2553 I had never heard of hqx before. That looks awesome, and I might actually try to implement it at some point

[@bytesandbikes]

Exactly that, @DxRed. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel-art_scaling_algorithms has a really good overview. Most of these are grid based methods that could be done as-is to each dimension in turn. Could probably be generalised to 3D, but I don't know of anyone who's done that.

[@DouglasDwyer]

The engine is in its very early stages right now, so it will be some time before I have a fully playable game. But I encourage you to follow along as I release more devlogs - I've made immense progress already! In the end, I want to create an online platform where users can build, destroy, interact, and create their own mods/plugins :)

[@linksword7110]

what is the biggest world size possible with your engine?

[@DouglasDwyer]

I use 32-bit integers as coordinates where a single voxel is equal to 2^8 = 256 units. As such, that means the world at a maximum can be 2^32/2^8 = 16 million voxels across in each direction. I've designed things so that the world should wrap around when you reach an edge.

[@linksword7110]

@@DouglasDwyer won’t going around the world diagonally take longer than directly north

[@DouglasDwyer]

Yes, I think that's an accurate assessment.

[@lunatikreal1384]

Add a little smoothness, as in 7dtd, and you can release it for sale, like alpha alpha in alpha)))

[@Jmac2110]

the demo doesn't work for me it just shows a white screen i am on an intel mac

[@DouglasDwyer]

Thanks for your interest in the project - I'm sorry to hear that! Make sure that you're using either Firefox, Edge, or Chrome (Safari is not supported). If you were using a supported browser, and you're willing to take five minutes to help out, I would appreciate it if you went to the demo site and opened the developer console. Take whatever errors you see there, and post them in the comments or on GitHub: github.com/DouglasDwyer/octo-release/issues/new

[@Jmac2110]

@@DouglasDwyer ok

[@Jmac2110]

i was in safari

[@Dongcryto_8488]

Voxel coin??

[@ただのオタクだ]

Your project reminds me a lot of this one voxel engine: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z4OYiHmQoJ1poac Have you seen this?

[@DouglasDwyer]

Indeed, Jon Lin's engine is part of the inspiration behind my own (and a few other) projects. I'm honored that you would compare my work to his :)

[@renedayhoff7629]

"Promo sm"