Irrlicht Engine

Hello, Niko,
I would like to know if you plan to implement voxel landscapes?.. I think that would be very useful...

Hm, is there a way to use voxels with todays 3d hardware? I don't think so..

When was the last time you saw a game that used a Voxel landscape R00mpel?

I would bet it was not designed to work with 3D acellerated video cards.

while voxel landscapes have many advantages over heightfield generated maps like overhangs, modern graphics cards do not support the method. Most voxel engines are now defunct as they cannot compete with the graphic quality and speed of other systems

It's a pity too, IMO. Voxels were very cool to work with when you needed speed and didn't have to worry much about surface detail.... Outcast and Comanche: Maximum Overkill were cutting edge at the time...

Some modern voxel engines:
http://www.theteahouse.com.au/gba/voxlap.html
http://www.base-sixteen.com/terraVox
http://eicart.free.fr/tracy/index.htm

Cool - thanks for the links. I didn't know there was such a thing as "modern voxel engines".
Man, I can't wait to see this VoxLap demo *downloading*. Looking at these pages, I think voxels can still have their unique advantages, even if it doesn't look like Doom3.

a big advantage of voxel terrains are that they are easily deformed in real-time. So craters for explosions etc are possible with very little effort

I checked out the demo of the voxil engine at

http://www.theteahouse.com.au/gba/voxlap.html

. and I just have to say that is SO much freakin fun exspecially after you find the red gun thing.(note it looks like a piece of a DNA strand. I kept looking for an actual gun.)

If you don't know what I am talking about it is there demo which is a cave where you can shoot everything and deform it in real time. It is really cool and a huge pointless time waster. There really isn't much there but definitly fun I had to delete it from my hard drive cause I wasn't working on classes.

hm any news on this?

this source code is amazing and fun. i'm glad i kept it just to share with you guys.

www.teslaenergy.ca/w2box/data/voxlap_src.tar.gz

Hi all,

I came across this thread recently when browsing the Irrlicht forum. I wanted to share my voxel technology with you as it may be interesting for people who want to integrate it with Irrlicht. I was going to post it at some point anyway, but as this thread has been bumped I might as well post it now.

Essentially, I have written a C++ library which represents a world as voxels and converts to to polygons on the fly. This means you can have the advantages of voxels (destructible environments, etc) while still exploiting your graphics hardware (shaders, lighting and shadowing, texture mapping, etc).

The project is in two parts. The underlying 'PolyVox' library is in clean C++ without any dependancies, and it should be possible to integrate this with Irrlicht. On top of this I am building a 3D engine using Ogre - this might not be as interesting to you but could still be a useful example of how to use the library.

The project is not finished but the PolyVox library is usable (though expect significant API changes in the future). It's released under the GPL but I may make it more liberal at some point soon.

You can read more about the project (and see a video) here: http://www.thermite3d.org

The screenshot below shows a partly destroyed environment:


Hope you find it interesting

wow, awesome stuff, Irrlicht or not
ofcourse your demo makes it seem as though some kind of invisible worm is having a field-day (circlular holes), but it seems to run really fast.
Doesn't take into account thickness of meshes (due to the "surface representation" of the mesh, as you called it), but its still pretty darn cool!

fmx wrote:wow, awesome stuff, Irrlicht or not

Thanks But like I said, it should be possible to use the core library with any renderer. In practice I may have made some assumptions about the format of the vertex/index buffers, etc, but hopefully nothing that can't be fixed.

fmx wrote:Doesn't take into account thickness of meshes (due to the "surface representation" of the mesh, as you called it), but its still pretty darn cool!

I assume you mean that, when you dig into the ground, you would expect to see soil or rock rather than empty space? Actually the technology handles this perfectly well. For example, see the game Forever War which uses an earlier version of the engine.

The reason the structures are so 'thin' in my own tech demo, is that the voxels were actually generated by converting a mesh (ironic I know!) of a castle. Obviously the original mesh was just a surface representation, so I would have to use some kind of 3D floodfill if I wanted to fill the gaps between the walls and under the grass.

Creating the voxel worlds is one of the tricky parts of making a voxel engine (Forever War generated them procedurally).

An example of using Ken Silverman's Voxlap in an actual game: http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net

Voxelstein 3D is a Wolfenstein inspired game with a completely destructible environment.