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. :)

Voxelizer Part 2

It's time to add some colors to the voxelizer! :)

I've been busy finishing a project on my work, so unfortunately I'm not spending the time that I would like to finish the voxelizer. For now I just added colors to the voxels based on the mesh textures. The process is pretty straight forward:
1) Loop trough all vertices of the meshes and apply their texel color to the mesh vertex color.
2) When checking if the triangle collided with a voxel (SAT), calculate the average color of the triangle and store it into the voxel
3) And finally render the mesh voxels with a shader that supports vertex color.

The following images illustrate those steps:

There is many other ways to do that, but for my purposes that's good enough. The main problem with this technique is that it wont works so well for low-poly models, because you will end up with not enough color information for your voxels. But this is not the case in Sponza Pallace.

The project is not ready to share, but I believe that it will be done until the next weekend.

Thread:
Voxelizer Part 1
Voxelizer Part 2
Voxelizer Part 3
Voxelizer Part 4 (Final)

Voxelizer Part 1

Here follows the first results of my voxelizer (the process to take a regular mesh and create a voxel representation). For the tests I'm using an old SpiderMan model that I created in 2005 (damn, I dunno how I found it on my HD) and Sponza Palace that Crytek donated to public domain (download link). I'm glad with the results, but I still have to take in account the model's texture to colorize the voxels. This is a small part of my Global Illumination studies. hehe

Just a few million of voxels. That's I call density. :D

In the next posts I will share the Unity webplayer demo and project source.

If you are interested to understand how it's made, I recomend you to start studing the "Separating Axis Theorem" (SAT). Here is some very usefull links about it:

http://www.codezealot.org/archives/55

http://www.metanetsoftware.com/technique/tutorialA.html


Thread:
Voxelizer Part 1
Voxelizer Part 2
Voxelizer Part 3
Voxelizer Part 4 (Final)