Build A World - new massive game, using Irrlicht

[sodandk]

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 875&type=3

some roman city in progress...

[sodandk]

Teslacoils are up!

great fun... a bunch of pics here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 875&type=3

[sodandk]

visual effects will be updated...

[devsh]

Update 27-03-2014 (0.5992)
- inventory now searchable with text
- number you want to manufact can now be increased with SHIFT or CTRL arrow up/down for 10/100 increments
- two types of teslacoil constructions added. Teslacoils will zap any player or animal. Teslacoils will zap if it can see movement, but cant 'see' through glass.
- inventory now has 'Metal' category
- bug fixed: wolves and sharks can now see you again, and will attack more precisely
- bug fixed: when resizing screen, sometimes left mouseclick stopped working ingame
- blue graphics updated (from grey)
- ForceField now uses 1 MW to simulate real world
- 5 new achievements added

tech:
- holding CTRL shows powerarea, and now also colors doors etc. blue
- mobs in the world are now handled much more efficiently
- bug fixed: server had a major leak, when saving maps

[sodandk]

Teslacoils

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2eCVVGRTCI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUhuxLWQ9sY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcEFiOl-804

[devsh]

We would like to proudly announce that our Volume Cone Renderer has become operational, after months of research and intensive development of never before seen technology of 3D volumetric data compression
We have been so quiet about this as it was a project with a high risk of failure (it could never make it out, we couldnt guess if this was feasible)

I can finally say that I achieved my life long dream of having been involved in bringing the first next-gen ray-traced game to the market, ahead of Epic or Crytek

Obviously this has not gone without extending irrlicht beyond the limits, we now have:
- OpenCL devices which can be linked to OpenGL driver or used separately (intel HD cards double up as OpenCL devices aside from your NVIDIA card)
- OpenGL and OpenCL interop
- OpenGL compute shaders, sparse and bindless textures

Just integrating compute shaders we were able to vastly speed up the FFT Water computation and enable proper HDR

Here is the first screenshot from our Volume Compressor (Voxelizes 3d meshes and compresses then into our own format)


We are now working really hard to transcode all of our assets into the 3d volumetric format... some of the assets (like the grass blocks, etc.) have to basically be sculpted or created in high resolution in Blender and ZBrush as no such game assets exist. Especially for the purpose of compression (we are squeezing 48GB of data into 2GB) we have rented 4 amazon GPGPU instances.

It will be yet another 4 or 5 months before all the assets are ready in HD and volumetric formats

The compressed voxel format and decompression algorithm will be an open spec, unencumbered by any patents which shall be released around the time that version 1.0 of BaW comes out. We really look forward to it becoming The Standard for next generation assets. From what I can divulge so far, we record the following material properties at every point:
--Albedo Color Channel + Transparency/Opacity
--Refraction Index + Physical Density
Normals we retrieve from the partial deriviatives of the tricubic interpolation functions for the optical density, although we are experimenting with a special normal compression algorithm for higher quality lighting

Because of the new data format, we had to change the render pipeline completely. For example, now we are barely using OpenGL functionality for rendering (except dynamic/moving and animated geometry and particles).
There are a lot of advantages:
--Real Reflections (as we trace rays through volumes we can reflect and bend them)
--Quick Ambient Occlusion (not SSAO which is physically inaccurate)
--Implicit Depth-Of-Field (we can simulate the focusing of a lens by moving the tip of the traced dual cone)
--No "conventional" aliasing (due to our volume mipmapping scheme, filtering and tracing technique we dont trace discrete points but sections of a volume)
--Physically Accurate Refraction and glass rendering
--Order Independent Transparency

This is a non realtime screenshot of a quick test put together (we havent redesigned the lighting system yet, so we pretty much had to brute force "path trace" this)


We have yet a few issues to sort out, such as how to integrate conventional particle rendering with volume rendering

But hopefully all of these problems are minor non-issues which can be worked around and surpassed

[ACE247]

Haha nice April 1st! I know that screenshot is a render from the Blender Forums

[christianclavet]

Hummm. Not impressed at all with the screenshot they provided. Doesn't seem to have any trace of global illumination. Path tracer seem to provide much better quality than what they presented here.

[devsh]

They completely miss the point that the future if any "tracing" method lays in voxels and not in triangles

[sodandk]

fishies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiqXr5idmmk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH-NDja-9B4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2cFFgmPr2w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eApROGvyZk

[sodandk]

Until we make more different habitats, then the animals will be mixed in, in the current ones. And yes, there will be warm and cold zones etc., with the 'correct' placed animals.

[sodandk]

Spawnerblocks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8glsdccyVQ

[sodandk]

modern style fish tanks

[sodandk]

and some screenies from 'Design Set 1'

[sodandk]

'Design Set 1' looks like a sci-fi spaceship.

yeah, some players wanted stuff like that to build with ...