Hello David,

I have been following your great project for quite a while and it inspired me, to start a similar project. That is why I am interested in some details of Thermite.

Since the fps highly increases if not everything is visible, I suppose you implemented some kind of view frustum culling, did you? Did you implement (or thought of) other culling techniques like occlusion culling too?

A LOD would be really desirable, but it seems to be a rather difficult problem on a voxel terrain. Did you already give it a try?

In your recent release you obviously avoided tri-planar texturing as far as you could. Is it that expensive or did you have other reasons?


I would really appreciate it, if you would answer the questions.

Hi,



Great! Can I ask, are you Tobias Tropper? I was expecting him to post some questions, and I'm not sure if it's you! I'm always interested in other voxel projects at any rate



At the moment it's just basic view frustum culling, as implemented by Ogre3D. Any occlusion culling technque of course needs to work with dynamic data, so precomputation isn't really possible. But there is a tequnique called Coherent Hierarchal Culling, which I'm intending to investigate at some point.



LOD is tricky. At the moment PolyVox supports generating lower LOD levels by downsampling the volume. One advantage to this is that low LOD levels can be generated more quickly than high LOD levels (rather than generating the high LOD, and then taking extra time to simplyfy it). A disadvantage is that the adjecent LOD levels don't line up properly.

I'm also interested in using conventional simplification techniques on a high resolution mesh to simplfiy it. This is hard though, and it's still a research area for me.



I haven't really measured how expensive it is, but the main reason was that I simply didn't want triplanar texturing for the surface of the landscapes (I wanted to be able to use textures created in a landscape modeling package). Triplanar texturing is still used for the voxels which are below the surface.

Mostly, I'm just trying to make the system more flexible so that any kind of texturing or material approach can be used.

Hi David,

thanks for your answer! You're right, it's me.

Do you have a screenshot or video showing the LOD?

Are there any news about projects using Thermite3D?

Not really... there are some screenshots of an old LOD system halfway down this page:

http://www.thermite3d.org/joomla/index. ... &Itemid=36

But it's not the system I described above.



Mostly information can be found here:

http://www.thermite3d.org/joomla/index. ... &Itemid=35

Though it's not updated very often. We're making good progress on our first game though. Instead of turn based strategy, it will be a single player game where you defend the earth from incoming asteroids:

Hi. I'm really impressed by this technology. Around 2004 I designed a video game with experimental game play for my thesis, without being too much involve into 3D programming and tech, I didn't know all the difficulties to implement all the requirements I designed. The project was nice considering it was my first attempt on creating a game, but didn't find the technology I needed.

By now, I'm re-implementing my game on my spare time using the Ogre engine which guided me to this web site.
I have run the demo and I really want to integrate the PolyVox into my project.... haven't downloaded the src yet though.
A little bit off topic, one specific question is about your logging system. I really like the way you divide the logs in categories, did you use a 3rd party library for this or did you implement yourselves? I want to use that same approach for my logging system.
Currently I'm using VC++2008, Ogre, CEGUI and Perforce.
Congratulations for your project and keep up the good work!

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! Do let us know if you have any problems building or setting up PolyVox and we'll do our best to help...

Qt and Ogre already have seperate logging systems and both of them can be redirected. For example, to redirect the Qt loging system you should look at the 'qInstallMsgHandler' function (but your not using Qt so maybe that doesn't matter). To redirect Ogre's logging system you use Ogre::Log::addListener().

The actual GUI with tabbed widgets is created using Qt. Each tab simply holds a text box widget.

All of this is handled by the QtOgre framework, which you can read about here: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=45709[/quote]

Hello. Haven't had the time to work at home the last months. I started working on the PolyVox and Thermite3d projects, to begin with getting the latest code.
I decided to use Qt among its OgreQt, Bullet, OgreBullet etc. Everything went well with the compiling and running the demos (OgreBulletDemos being the most important IMO), Qt demos are also working good. Very nice it all works using the latest versions of each projects (ogre 1.7.1, boost 1.43, bullet 2.76).
PolyVox solution was created using CMake, a VS2008 solution was created (which is what I expect and need).
Anyways, when trying to compile, I realize PolyVox is using "cstdint" which means switching to VS 2010 or using boost. I don't really want to switch to VS 2010, I use boost as much as I can in my projects, but I will need to change the headers in the PloyVox project.

Is there another workaround to fix this or am I missing something? Since I tried to compile "library\PolyVoxCore\include\PolyVoxImpl\Utility.h" using #include "boost/cstdint.hpp" and still the compiler complains, I'm sure something else is missing, I would really appreciate a little help or advice on this set up. Thanks in advance.
Update: Using stdint.h which is suppose to work for VS2008 would be a third option

Yes, you are correct. Actually we only started using VS 2010 recently and until that point we were using Boost for the int types and shared_ptr. As VS 2010 introduced C++0x support we no longer need Boost and it was easiest to remove it.

The easiest approach for you to get this working is to use an older version of PolyVox. I believe the last working revision would be 1098 (commited 13th April 2010). You can see that that revision comes with a bunch of Boost headers which are needed to compile under VS 2008.

If you do need the latest version then yes, you will have to replace the int types and shared_ptr's with boost version. Maybe you can use a naughty macro - something like:

#define std::shared_ptr boost:shared_ptr

I wouldn't normally recommend macro tricks like that but it might be easiest for you.

Thanks, I already compile all the PolyVox and Thermite doing what you mentioned.
I had some issues when trying to run loading the TechDemo resources. I created the TechDemo.bat, trying to have the same settings as for the compiled demo you provide, couldn't find any other info on how to structure the project correctly, but runs perfect!
Not sure what the problem is, but it only works when loading the castle(small).map, any other of the maps produce a crash which I haven't been able to identify why. Before crashing, it fully loads the data but when attempting to load the Extracting surface the problem arise.
Your compiled version for the demo runs without problems in my computer, terrain_Editor_Demo.map, so either I missed some data or something went wrong with the compiling.

Well, to be honest I'm impressed you managed to get it to compile! I'm not sure what the cause of the crash would be though. Does it happen with both Direct3D and OpenGL render systems? I do recall I had a problem with the Direct3D one. Otherwise you could try a debug build but but be aware it can take several minutes to extract the volume...

So I'm curious, what are your intentions for PolyVox/Thermite? I'm working on scripting support at the moment which will hopefully mean you can create applications without all that messing about in C++ It's probably a few onths off though.