voxatron-like engine

[m4rvin]

Hi,

irrlicht can do voxatron-like game
view area is 128x128x64 voxels
fps is around ~60 with around ~30K tris on OpenGL driver. faster with D3D9.

still needs better lighting - shadows
maybe occlusion culling too

choppy video @ http://www.munchyapps.com/uncategorized/voxels-128
download demo @ http://munchyapps.com/downloads/vox.zip
> arrows to move
> '1' to change map

[Virion]

Cool!! The choppiness is due to screen recording or the game itself?
Very cool.

[ACE247]

Wooo Neat work!

[m4rvin]

the choppy video was just from the recording.

i did a round of optimization and got the polygon count down and framerate further up.
this runs on Android by the way. but still at just around 15 fps.



techniques
> rendering & caching chunks (CVertexBuffers)
> combining voxels faces whenever possible
> LOD for particles

some more to ideas that could lower the polygon count further:
> LOD for map
> sprites for particles instead of cubes
> keep map simple, flat or blocky
> render static text to texture

got any ideas?

[ACE247]

That running at 15FPS on Android is pretty decent!

[m4rvin]

15FPS on Android

there is a hiccup though when i scroll through the map - that is when many chunks of voxels are processed.
i could cache the entire map for speed but that i'd have to make it very efficient on memory

[m4rvin]

i made a raycast version. polygon cubes for voxel feels like cheating.
this is probably how voxatron does it anyway. but with better quality

runs on android at just 5fps. but at least the frame rate is constant - no hiccups

one problem with raycast is no easy way to handle floating objects as wave surfing skips them

Demo http://www.munchyapps.com/downloads/vox.zip

[christianclavet]

Hi, Nice work, but switching to raycast doesnt work here. Got a black screen and nothing happen. Got around 236 FPS in Polygon mode.