Monday, October 7, 2013

Voxel Engine "Based" Projects

Recently I had a pleasant surprise to see that the Voxel Engine that I shared in this blog was able to help some guys to develop some amazing projects.

Inverto

"Inverto" is a first person shooter-puzzler with gravity manipulations. Game is ideological successor of such games as "Prey" and "Portal" with a pinch of parkour. Proceed all of the testing areas as a simple researcher with your trusty GraviGun. Prepare to explore Escher-esque spaces and solve navigational puzzles by changing gravity direction, employing body momentum and fighting nausea (only if you have weak vestibular system). "Inverto" is developed on Unity3D game engine and is planned on Windows, Mac, Linux and Web. Will be released later this summer. Current version of the game is in alpha state, and does not represent final product quality.


http://www.indiedb.com/games/gravitron
http://inverto.gravityboxstudio.net/



BitDrill

Although currently in it’s early stages, BitDrill is a game that is being developed by one man about online mining and combat. The basic idea of the game is that you and your friends get on a LAN game (currently, may add a server later) and mine. You sell off the resources gathered to obtain cash. With the cash you can then buy upgrades. With the upgrades you can mine deeper. Or you can fight your friends!

http://bitdrill.wordpress.com/


Optimizations

Other Unity forum users like RetromadeGames used the engine as well and shared some thoughts. Right now we are trying to optimize the chunk generation. I will post here if we are able to find some simple fixes to improve the engine performance. 
For now some things that you guys could try is avoid to recreate the mesh at every chunk refresh and use mesh double buffer and mesh markDynamic. But the biggest issues are:

  • Recreate the mesh collider (as Tito, a user of BitDrill pointed out, it's better to use aabb collision. This will fix most of the performance issues)
  • Soft Lightning. This could be and must be optimized ( this was just a proof of concept ).

Like I said before, this was just a prototype and it need a lot of work to get into a real project. So congrats for all those people who created some really nice things using the Voxel Engine. And please, let me know if someone else create something cool using this. :)