As has been mentioned previously, the current version of Cubiquity is no longer under active development as the focus has shifted to a replacement ‘Cubiquity 2’ system which is being developed outside of the ‘Volumes of Fun’ brand. Although the replacement system is still a long way from being ready, I feel it is time to remove the current version from the Unity Asset Store.

The reason is that I don’t want to encourage people to use a system which I no longer have the time and resources to support, and I think that having the system available on the asset store does exactly this. Cubiquity for Unity3D was developed under Unity 4 and has only limited testing under Unity 5, and as the Unity 5.x series progresses I’m increasingly becoming aware of problems which I don’t have time to investigate.

The system will remain available on BitBucket as it is open source software, but that provides a slightly higher barrier to entry and comes with a warning about the system no longer being developed. I’m expecting that Cubiquity 2 will go on GitHub to avoid any confusion between the two versions, but more on that in the future.

Voxeliens is a retro-style arcade shooter and is essentially a 3D voxel-based version of Space Invaders. We released the game in 2012, showed it off at the Develop Conference and have had it accepted for Steam Greenlight. However, as mentioned in several previous blog posts, time is no longer on our side and we are re-focusing our efforts on the next version of Cubiquity.

Therefore we have decided to release Voxeliens for free under the MIT license. It now lives on BitBucket alongside PolyVox and Cubiquity (our voxel engines) and prebuilt binaries for Windows are also provided. It should also be possible to built it from source (including on Linux) but this has not been well tested on systems other than our own.

We put a lot of work into Voxeliens so we are pleased to now be able to share it with a much larger audience. Note that we do still have the option of selling it on Steam in the future (the Greenlight campaign remains valid) but it is not clear whether we will due to the setup, testing, and support required. At any rate, we hope you enjoy the game!

I made the first public release of PolyVox nearly 10 years ago on the Ogre 3D forums. At the time it was just a simple demo to show how voxels and Marching Cubes could be used to create more dynamic environments, but over the years it evolved into a stand-alone library which has been used by several games and our own Cubiquity voxel engine. It’s been a big part of my life for the last 10 years, but as mentioned in previous blog posts I now have less time and am over-committed with the various projects I’m involved in.

Therefore I have decided to officially cease development on PolyVox, though in practice it has not seen much work for the last couple of years. This follows the wrapping up of the current version of Cubiquity last year, and my plan is still to put the majority of my development time into ‘Cubiquity 2’. This will be completely new voxel engine with more limited scope and a focus on research rather than production use (i.e. for the more adventurous!).

More generally, I have some intention of winding down the rest of ‘Volumes of Fun’ over the coming months and breaking Cubiquity 2 into a standalone organisation and/or project on GitHub. But the details of this aren’t really clear yet, and we also need to work out what to do with Voxeliens. For now the existing support channels (e.g. the forums) will remain open and I expect I’ll just provide email support if/when they disappear.

In our last blog post we laid out a new direction for our Cubiquity voxel engine, including open sourcing the code and shifting the focus towards research for a future Cubiquity version 2. The first part of this is now complete, and the whole technology stack is now available under the MIT license:

• PolyVox: Low-level classes for storing and processing voxel data
• Cubiquity: A higher-level voxel engine built on PolyVox
• Cubiquity for Unity3D: Integration with the Unity game engine
• Cubiquity for Unreal: Integration with the Unreal game engine

The main advantage (as well as freedom!) of this new MIT release is that users can attempt to compile the core Cubiquity library for new platforms whereas we previously only supported Windows, OS X, and Linux. You’ll be own your own here (there are no real build instructions), but we have had reports of it working at least on the iPhone.

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—– > Update: Cubiquity 2 is now on GitHub here. <—–

When we began working on Cubiquity the main idea was to expose our PolyVox library through a higher-level interface and tools. PolyVox is powerful and flexible, but requires a strong knowledge of C++, templates and computer graphics to use effectively. By wrapping this in Cubiquity and integrating it with Unity/Unreal we were hoping to bring (some of) it’s capabilities to a larger audience.

The project has been a reasonable success, with a lot of interest from the Unity and Unreal communities and even a game launched on Steam using the technology. However, it is also clear that the original vision is simply too large to finish as a personal side project, especially with diminishing amounts of free time and a desire to adjust my work/life balance. This led to use recently releasing the system for free, but further steps need to be taken to actually reduce the scope.

In this blog post I want to outline the areas in which I/we will be cutting back on development, and explain how it will affect existing users. I also want to define a direction for a future ‘Cubiquity 2.0’ such that it is both smaller and also more technically interesting to work on. This means shifting the focus to research rather than delivering a drop-in system, open-sourcing the complete technology stack, and reducing (but not eliminating) the level of integration provided for Unity and Unreal.

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Well we’ve got some exciting news today – we’re pleased to announce that Cubiquity for Unity3D is now available for free! It has always been free for non-commercial and evaluation use, but we are removing this restriction so that you can use the system for commercial purposes too. This is effective immediately, and you can download Cubiquity for Unity3D via the asset store or from BitBucket.

Cubiquity let’s you create natural voxel terrains and edit them in real time, or build your worlds from millions of tiny colored cubes.

So what has led to this decision? Well, there are a number of factors at play here:

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Today we are pleased to announce that a new version of Cubiquity for Unity3D has been released on the asset store. Version 1.2 brings performance and memory gains, adds support for 64-bit architectures, includes faster transfer of mesh data from the native library, and provides experimental heightmap import.

Our new example map shows a city modeled at a resolution of 512x512x64 voxels which can be destroyed in real-time (complete with physics). Data courtesy of William Rigby and the game ‘Build&Shoot’).

We have improved both performance and memory usage by introducing an octree to reduce the number of mesh chunks which are active at an given time. We’ve combined this with a sophisticated time-stamping system, which allows us to minimize the amount of work required to synchronize our internal representation with Unity’s scene hierarchy. The city map shown above loads in just a few seconds and runs smoothly with destruction and physics enabled.

We have also replaced our ‘ConvertToVDB’ and ‘ConvertToImages’ tools with a single general purpose tool called ‘ProcessVDB’. This provides experimental support for importing heightmaps as terrain volumes – experimental in the sense that it seems to work well but needs some refinements to the workflow.

This map was created using the new functionality to import from a heightmap. Once in the editor the usual sculpting tools can be applied to create caves and overhangs, or to apply materials and textures.

The licensing model hasn’t changed – you can use the system free for non-commercial and evaluation use, or for $200 (per-seat) you can buy a commercial license through the Unity asset store:

• Download the free non-commercial and evaluation version
• Buy Cubiquity for Unity3D on the Asset Store
• Read user manual and API documentation
• Get support in our Unity3D forum thread

For those of you who are waiting on the integration with Unreal Engine 4, I spent some time with Matt over Christmas and saw that the system is indeed progressing nicely. Both the smooth terrain and ‘colored cubes’ volumes are largely working though integrating with the editor and blueprint system is a lot of work. We both have only limited time so there’s not currently a set schedule for the initial release, but keep an eye on the forum thread for the latest updates.