Awesome stuff! You're really making good progress with this and it seems like it must be in a pretty useable state. Also the image of the imported volume (the castle) was very nice.

I'm back from holiday now so can answer questions a bit more, and I should have time to do more coding in a couple of weeks. Can't wait to get back into it And I'll try and look into that crash which you mentioned on GameDev.

Thank you!
but the image wasn't final. I just was impressed what our artist did with the terrain. Here is the final one:

Hi David!

Sorry, I've not been here for a long time, but we finally made a video of which I think it may interest you.

Here is the deferred layer feature in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48MM9zzMxRM

Wow, that's really something! Seriously cool stuff. Nice editor, nice lighting, and the material blending looks good. So what are you doing in the end? Are you storing your materials in a PolyVox volume or in a GPU volume texture?

I'm also having some time again now to work on PolyVox and Thermite. I've been tidying up some PolyVox code and will fix that crash you had with the voxels at the edge of the volume. I'm also hoping to do a new Thermite release in the next couple of months. For this demo I won't do terrain though - I'm going for this kind of look instead. But it probably won't look that good

Btw, I have a question about the grass in your previous screenshot - did you place it manually or it appears automatically on a certain material?

Thanks for watching! (And liking )



We already have a game in mind, and before I build in a new feature, I look what we still need for it.
Here is it's ModDB page: http://www.moddb.com/games/beyondjupiter Yeah, there isn't much now, but we are holding back a lot
of it. Once the engine is capable of other things we need we can show more (But it rapidly nears that state)


I figured out using a 3D-Texture is completely senseless and overcomplicated in this case. I put the weights of the layers directly into the vertices (Yes, all of them),
so I don't need to sample several 3D-Textures every frame. I'm currently writing the news-posting for ModDB which explains that, finally.



The crash isn't very important right now, but the holes which appear from time to time are. You can see that in the video, but don't confuse them with the breaking of the chunk-areas.
Usually they come in form of 2 or 3 polygons. There is a part of the video, where the artist presses one of the buttons with a red border, and all chunk-edge-holes disappear. But only one not.

I just don't know how I should bring you closer to this. Maybe I could give you a copy of the engine (Binaries only then I think, but not sure...) if that would help. But it's not very easy to master in it's current state. Thats why I focused on rewriting the GUI now. It's already good and pretty
Here you can see a picture of it: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=580367 (Funny topic btw)




D: www.minecraft.net I say! http://img815.imageshack.us/i/coolo.jpg/



In the last screenshot the gras was placed manually, indeed. But I will implement automatic growing once I'm finished with the new GUI and the new Shader Editor.

Ah, yes, I remember seeing that now. Looks kind of crazy

For PolyVox it seems you have three problems then. I'm sure we can fix them all...

1) PolyVox crashes sometimes with voxels on the edge of the volume.

I believe this is now fixed as I've been improving and cleaning up the PolyVox codebase. I can give you a new release to test probably on Monday.

2) When you are editing the terrain the correct regions are not always being regenerated.

I saw on GameDev that you are doubling the radius to decide what regions to regenerate. Unfortunatly this is not very accurate. What you should do is keep a flag for each region of whether it is up to date. Each time you modify a voxel you should compute exactly which region it is in (can be up to eight regions) and set the flag to mark it for regeneration.

If you modify several voxels at once then it will be faster to compute the bounding box of the shape you are making and then set all the flags at once. It seems you are always drawing a sphere, and computing the bounding box of a sphere is easy.

You should have a look at my VolumeChangeTracker class. I might take it out of PolyVox in the future, but it should give you some ideas.

3) Sometimes there are holes in the generated surface.

Tricky one. I think the best solution is if you save your volume to disk with 'saveVolumeRaw()' and send me the result. You will also need to tell me the type of the voxels (MaterialDensityPair44?) and the coordinates of the Region that is causing the problem. And also a screenshot of what that region looks like for you. I will extract the surface myself and see if I get the same problem.

Ok, I have uploaded a new version of PolyVox to: http://www.thermite3d.org/temp/PolyVox-Rev1172.zip

This should fix the crashes when doing the surface extraction at the edge of the volume. There are a couple of other changes to watch out for:

1) SurfaceExtractor interface has changed slightly - all parameters are now passed to the constructor and then you call the execute() member function.

2) Volume::getVoxelAt() no longer takes a fourth parameter for the default value. Instead, use Volume::setBorderValue() if you need to set the value which is returned for voxels outside the volume.

I should warn you this isn't very well tested as I've mostly been working on Thermite, so be sure to back up your stuff first!

Hi David,

I'm sorry for not being here for that long time. School started again, and it is bogging me down with loads of homework. This also slows down development,
so i hope it will change with time (Should...).

However, I wrote a new news article about how I render the layers: http://www.indiedb.com/engines/wtech/ne ... -rendering
You can see how poorly it has been written (My vault, not our translaters). No proper formating, ugly pictures (At least the first few), yeah. I hope you enjoy it


I also thank you for uploading the new version of polyvox. I can't look into it today (It's 21:05 PM right now), but I will tomorrow, definitely. And then, when I'm working with
PolyVox anyways, I will write you some Volume-Exporter-Foo to get a volume, with a nice hole in it, sent to you.

I also would like to know if you are interested in trying the next internal release version of [w]tech. I think you would like to see yourself what we've made with PolyVox
Also you are the Author of a very important part of the engine, if I can say it like that. So I would like to give you access to our forums, only if you want of course.
Would be great if you could help us to test the new internal releases. Even if the next release will take some time:
Version 0.16 will be a real milestone-release. There is so much new! But this means, there are so many potential bugs.. Also, my todo for it is still very full.
But I'm sure I will have to do some indev-releases of the versions. So you would probably get it earlier.

Just let me know if you are interested. I'll send you an E-Mail then.

No problem, real life is like that I have been busy over the last few months, and everyday I would just think about the cool things I wanted to try if only I had time. But now I do have time again... let's see how long it lasts!

Yep, I already saw that as I do check your ModDB page from time to time. I should really update mine at some point!

Don't worry, take your time (and do back up first!). There is a built in function 'saveVolumeRaw()' which you should be able to use (not sure how tested it is...).

Yep, sure, it sounds good. I'll be interested to see how then engine is coming on. It will also make it easier to identify/fix any PolyVox related bugs that are found.

Good news: I built it in and found no real problems so far! Just one thing: The GetVoxelAt() implementation complained about the parameter you removed, so I had to fix this in you code.
Now it works fine.



I wrote the volume saver a few weeks ago. I had to make a few changes, so I copied the code over and modified it. You were using std::streams, but I needed it to be fstreams, so I changed that. However, the file-format stays the same.

Here's a small volume for you (See .zip below):



I really would like to create an account for you now, but unfortunatley I have no Idea how!
In our private forum you can't simply register (I think), and I never had to create an account for someone yet. A teammate did that whenever we needed a new one. I'll ask him when he comes online.