Voxtopolis - Ray Traced Voxels

[plucky flax]

Looks dope

[timber valley]

Working on building tools!

[plucky flax]

It looks cool but too complicated for a survival game

[dire axle]

Looks super cool, but overly complicated

[timber valley]

@plucky flax @dire axle That's good feedback! Because the rendering supports it, I want to offer the player lots of customization. I'll see if there can be a bigger split between simple/presets and more detailed customization

[plucky flax]

I think maybe you can make it so that you unlock more of it by upgrading your tools, that way you'd understand it step by step

Like at the start you only have to understand basic building, then you get to resize the blocks too and then etc... it'd be progressive

[timber valley]

yes i am planning this! the patterns for example will be unlockables, where default is a noise pattern. Won't be showing the pattern creation UI if nothing is available 🙂

[plucky flax]

Nice!

Also the switch from 3rd to 1st person when building feels wrong

[timber valley]

The third person camera is a bit off to the side and the character is pretty big, blocking the view a bit. For example with the crossbow aim.
I think the 1p camera works better for building and wanted to make the switch snappy. Curious to why you think it feels wrong 😛

[plucky flax]

It feels better with the crossbow aim

[plucky flax]

Two things feels wrong to me:
1- I'm not used to seeing that in video games (which is just personal)
2- The animation when switching

[fiery ferry]

I think this looks awesome only thing i found weird is building being almost instant but breaking takes a pretty long time. No hate Keep up the good Work

[plucky flax]

I first thought the same then remembered it's the same in Minecraft

[timber valley]

Yes the main reason is to not allow instantly digging through terrain. Placing blocks has a limited area

[fiery ferry]

Ye i understand. But miss placing would be kinda bad? but ig you just need to be good lol

[timber valley]

Like accidentally misplacing obsidian in minecraft haha

Ill keep tweaking the break times and placing mechanics while developing until it feels right!

[fiery ferry]

Ye, lol

[final moon]

I want to play around with voxels... do you use a culling system? Also if you mind me asking, what rendering pipeline are you using and how do you handle million of tiny voxels?

[timber valley]

No occlusion culling, but chunk based front to back sorting + early ztest.
Also chunk based frustum culling.
Each chunk is 64³ voxels and uses a sparse octree data structure to keep memory usage small! (~2gb at 4k display)

I use the built in render pipeline with a lot of command buffers for camera events

It scales well, from budget gpus at 1080p 60 to 4k120fps at my 3080

[final moon]

Nice, one more thing because I love this, is each voxel it's own mesh or do you clump together each chunk into one mesh. If so, how do you then "mine" through that chunk mesh?

[timber valley]

each chunk is a encapsulating mesh yes, it does ray tracing in the fragment shader to get the actual voxel values and outputs to gbuffers.
The voxel data is managed on cpu and pushed to a gpu buffer when updated

[timber valley]

More building tool improvements! Selections are now serialized to the world's save folder and (end of video) got a realtime preview renderer working!
next up will be placing your selection to quickly copy paste areas, and save favorites to make them available as assets in different worlds

[plucky flax]

This is super cool! But I'm not sure it's good with a "survival" game

[fringe needle]

imo it's fine

Minecraft has like a practically endless palette of blocks

adding another way to customize voxels wouldn't be so bad either

[timber valley]

Building Tools Preview!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pceBOXLYYc0