I don't know about the UK, but in the US these laws are pretty fking loose. Like... say you didn't want to get in trouble, you just have us release the game in the US until you quit your job there, and then you just start your own business as an international game/programming consultant . I was seriously thinking about being a bioinformatics consultant because then I would get paid roughly the same amount for working half the year... but then you pay with stress of not knowing when your next paycheck is coming... reduced lifespan all that garbage. So who knows, I'm not even out of college yet right!

I would be really really surprised however if your non-competition agreements make it so you can't profit off of any side projects related to your field that you don't do during company time. Anyways, as far as the opensource part goes, and continued work on polyvox, as I get more familiar with everything I'd be happy to help contribute. I'm very interested in this particular project and wouldn't mind giving back!

I PM'd paycheck about why I can't start a business (at the moment).

But regarding contributions, they are of course welcome. When it comes to that we'll need to give some thought as to how it should be handled. Bug fixes and small changes can just be sent as patches of course, but bigger changes might require SVN access for maintainance work. Or maybe in the future we look at Gitorious or something.

Actually, I think it might be more useful to simply set up a Wiki. There've been some useful code snippets posted in the forums which should probably be kept somewhere (I'm thinking about beyzend's face-merging surface extractor, the Ogre material scripts people have pasted together from other forum postings, etc). Maybe some things can be moved from the main site to the Wiki, like the voxel resources page.

Ok, if/when I set this up I'll start a new topic.

The company thing, a couple of people I know were talking about starting a multimedia company with a starting focus on comics, music production and video games. It sort of fizzled due to lots of reasons. One of the founders had to move away to due some family issues. Others I hardly ever talk to anymore. I'm like the only one who is any serious into games dev. Plus that everyone talks about making games, but when it comes down to really getting something together...it's no joke.

For myself, although I'm currently developing this game on my own, my plans was to always to eventually find others to work together. Just trying to get a base together. So yes, I am interested in working together on some projects.

I think this may be a good idea for the future. It's probably best to wait until we think it's more necessary. However, I have already run a test conversion of PolyVox to Git and it would be easy for me to do the same for Thermite too.


Sounds good to me. A wiki would be a good place to organise these things. I've seen something about the version of PHP being used by your hosting provider being slightly old and perhaps not supporting newer software. They're supposed to be updating by the end of the year but it's worth making sure the latest version is enabled.

I also realise that I haven't actually introduced myself on this thread yet: My real name is Matt Williams, I'm a 23 year-old British particle physicist currently working towards my PhD on the LHCb experiment at CERN along with the University of Warwick in the UK. I'm currently living in Geneva, Switzerland. I'm David's younger brother and in PolyVox/Thermite I've been helping out with the build system, documentation sub-system and making sure that everything continues to compile and work on Linux. I also work on the open-source KDE project and am involved with Falcon and do miscelaneous software packaging for openSUSE.

_________________
Matt Williams
Linux/CMake guy

Yep, if you have any suggestions for Wiki software then I'm open to hearing them. MediaWiki is a fairly safe/standard choice but probably more than we need. DokuWiki is also supposed to be nice and is much more lightweight (doesn't even need a database).

I've used DokuWiki at several of the places where I used to work. It's simple and pretty intuitive. I also had it setup on my Linux box and it was easy to maintain on that front. Only thing is all the cases the number of users were small, so I'm not sure how it scales.

Hey!

I'm working in voxel procedural manipulation hoping that so much fucking around with code will inspire me to create something fun to play with.

Minecraft had someting to do with my decision to make a graphical style from some cubes, but I'm not intending to clone Notch's work.

My weapons of choice for this endeavour are:

ez3d. My own crossplatform engine, working with OpenGL.
Polyvox. Obviously
Bullet. I need to do something with this, creating a btCompundShape from voxel boxes is destined to fail miserably. Otherwise, working beautifully.
libnoise. Because my own noise functions sucked hard =)


And that's that.
I hope to get some answers to questions that have been keeping me awake since the beginning of the project (monday).
I don't know where to get my UV coords to texture stuff the old fashioned way (You see, I develop for the third world. My netbook doesn't have VBOs!)

Some pics

Love this light effect =)


Chunk spawing for the win!



This volumes (64 chunks of 32x128x32 voxels or, in layman terms, over nine thousand voxels!) took 20 seconds to load from hard drive (Both voxel and mesh data).
I'd love to RLE the crap out of my chunks ^^

Chau! (That's "bye" in spanish-argentinian)

For U,V coords you may need something like Triplanar texturing as voxel cannot be textured the normal way (don't quote me on this though). You can find some info here:
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=e ... 887e893d25

Minecraft doesn't use any of that, it uses texture Atlas. One can map cubes into this texture atlas using a simple transform, such as using the world coordinates as U,Vs. You can probably find some more info in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=77

For noise lib, you may want to check out noise++
http://noisepp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
It is basically a interface compatible with libnoise, but with some slight optimization, plus options to trade quality for performance.

Thanks beyzend!

I'm currently using your RLE mesh extraction code. =)

EDIT: Not anymore, I need a SurfaceExtractor with normals.
Tried to add them to your code and nothing was ever extracted anymore =p
I'll try to simplify the resulting mesh from CubicExtractorWithNormals

Welcome aboard! I also like the lighting in your first image

Are you using shaders or the fixed function pipeline? I don't think the lack of VBOs is a problem, but if you don't have access to shaders then you'll need to generate the texture coordinates on the CPU instead. I think this should still be possible, but I haven't thought about it much.

Also, have a look at this thread: http://www.thermite3d.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87

You mean for the volume data or the meshes? A couple of people have mentioned they would like better compression of the volumes so it will happen at some point. This weekend I'll make my todo list public so you guys have some idea what is coming.

Again, if you have access to shaders then you can generate normals in the pixel shader. If you don't have shaders then you are stuck with CubicExtractorWithNormals.