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

A lot of possibilities for really cool gameplay.

This looks really cool... I particularly like the way their 'cubic' terrain also has some angles in it.

The use of transparent block as markers for where blocks will be placed reminds me of an idea I had myself. I was thinking about an RTS game where you place a building and initially the whole building has that kind of transparency effect. Then the workers have to collect the blocks to actually build it. Plus it could then be damaged and reparied or something.

Wow that's a really nice start to their game. I can see it has a lot of potential.

David - I'd love to hear from you about how they may be doing some of the things they are. I am specifically interested in how I could use PolyVox to perform a surface extraction where certain parts of the ground is smooth whilst blocky in others.

I'm not exactly sure but I have some ideas. Ignoring the smooth parts, the shape of their terrain looks similar to Marching Cubes applied to binary values (i.e. without density values). You can see similar terrain in one of ker's images:



However, it's not exactly the same so it's probably some variation of this algorithm. To do this in PolyVox I think you would want to write a custom surface extractor.

As for the smoothing they may simply be taking the mesh and splitting it into those triangles which face roughly up and those that don't. Then they could apply a mesh smoothing filter to the up-facing part (whilst locking the position of the edge vertices to avoid tears). In fact they probably don't even need split the mesh - just constrain the ability of vertices to move based on where their normals point. At any rate you would want some custom smoothing code.

But there might be other approches (smoothing the volume data rather than the mesh?) so it would need some experimentation...

Hrm. Doesn't PolyVox have a smoothing surface extractor already? I thought it was part of the density value system.

Yes it does, I use it in my procedural terrain engine.

I think they are mentioning the fact that the edges are cubed, and it appears as terrain is mined it is dug out in cubes. Its possible they are applying some geometry shading to the top layer, or storing the top layer as different "materials" in order to render them differently.

Either way I'm definitely going to be watching the progress on this one.

_________________
--Real Programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
--xkcd--

Hrm. We really need to sort this kind of stuff out in regards to the PolyVox lib - Its such a great lib, but I feel like it falls short in that final stretch on outputting a renderable scene.
GM_Riscvul - How does yours look so far? Any screenshots?

I have posted some screenshots in the Showcase forum. You are welcome to take a look and follow the links to the repository. Its open-source.

I'm sure polyvox could use some polishing and some extra features would be nice, but I thought it does a fine job of creating a mesh. I don't think it would be difficult to implement logic to tweak the output. I wish there were some good optimizations, or possibly a way to thread operations in order to improve the speed of extraction.

Perhaps I am being greedy.

_________________
--Real Programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.
--xkcd--