Hey everyone the game is dead. I'm working on something new now that I have almost a decade of experience, but I'm balancing that with a AAA career so will be a few years until I post anything about it. Until then, subscribe and maybe you will see a video from me pop into your feed in a few years.
I have seen way too many conspiracy videos where people use projection artifacts in Google Maps (on Earth, the Moon, or on Mars) to "prove" there's a hole to the centre of the Earth, a coverup on the Moon, or life on Mars, etc. People be crazy, and math be hard.
GothAlice Yeah, afaik the Bermuda triangle gained notoriety because of a single spectacular case, but doesn't otherwise stand out as being the location of a lot of accidents. The myth just stuck :)
Oh crap, if game continues developing as slow as it does now, Ben should have longer lifespan than a normal human. Wish you luck with SoA, and a faster development speed, or atleast a longer lifespan for you guys, and me. I want to see release of SoA and Half-Life 3.
Awesome work, I wouldn't worry about peoples views on distortion, navigators and cartographers had a very similar problem when designing naval mapping haha. The reason for so many different styles of map is in determining what is important to the reader, whether it's proportionality or accuracy of distance.
For anyone who wants another take at spherical planets, take a look at the development of PlanetSmith :) It's ongoing and doesn't use cubes but hexagonal blocks.
I've discovered your project like a month ago while looking on how to do properly various things in a voxel game engine ( especially the lightning propagation, huge thanks for making a reddit post on that ! ). And I gotta say that this is, by far, the best and the most promising blocky space-sim game I have ever saw, and if such a game is vowed to success then SoA should be that one. Cheers from a lazy 18 years-old belgian programmer.
***** Thanks for the support, and I am glad one of my blogs was useful to you! I have to agree that this game is promising. There's just SO much potential here, which is why I am so damn excited about making it! Plus building worlds is pretty fun...
Ben Arnold I played Minecraft for *years* and I always have been a bit frustrated with it's limited engine and lack of new content ( and lately their shitty politics ). That's why I started modding it and this year I eventually came to start working on my own cube game. I played a bit starmade back when it was a thing and the concept was nice but executed quite poorly. On the side of it SoA seems to have the best/most advanced/fastest voxel engine out there, you've got a really good base to work on. IMO for it to succeed what it will need is a nice gameplay and mountains of content. It's clearly the most ambitious voxel game I heard of ( if not game as a whole in terms of sheer size and possibilities ). Also keep doing these technical blogs posts, it's always interesting to read.
Shout out to TH-cam showing me someone else’s attempt at solving the SPECIFIC problem with many of the same specific details I have been pondering the past few days! Awesome videos on here, bummer I’m years too late. Hope all has been going well for you!
Once you can generate entire planets from the very beginning and get space to planetary landings figured out, you can do ANYTHING with that engine. That is something frontier developments did not get right.
+Ben Arnold I know this is an old video, but I was going to say, if some camera shaking was added, due to entering atmosphere ;), then you could hide the change in size/position of the landscape features, not sure about exiting the planet, but I feel most people would be looking to space while exiting.
It won't. Im working on something new now that I have almost a decade of experience, but im balancing that with a AAA career so will be a few years until I post anything about it.
@@DubstepCoder ah makes sense, tho this thing is open source right? So like anybody can just pick it up and make something of it if they want possibly?
I might have been tempted to use parametric coordinates to create oddly shaped cubes that get smaller towards to core of the planet (think pie slices). However, if the planet is large enough, it would have looked fine.
Okay so I’m really impressed by this game, and I plan to mess around with the source code to get a better understanding of this, but I’ll be honest I was so upset when I found this channel… I have had an extremely similar idea for a block game where you can build a ship and travel between other blocky planets. My game idea is far simpler than this however, as I didn’t plan on having like realistic orbits and a massive solar system to explore, I was really thinking of the planets in my game as an equivalent to dimensions in Minecraft, so there would only be like 2 or 3 planets to travel between each with their own mobs, world generation, etc. but the method you guys were doing with SoA for full planet scale generation was pretty much exactly how I imagined doing it when I got around to working on my game. Tho I would have just had a single massive plane that you loop around, PAC-MAN style (that would make things like coordinates weird if I didn’t manage it properly, but I still think that’s how I would do it regardless). Then of course when you fly out into space, I’d do some rendering trickery to make the planet appear to be spherical, tho I don’t really know how I’d do that other than mapping the plane to a sphere based on what direction you’re looking at the world, so avoid the player seeing any distortion, but as a new programmer I am not sure how I would do that. But yeah, all and all this is awesome stuff. I know this project is done with, but I am still grateful for the work you guys have done on this amazing looking game and I thank you for the inspiration and the motivation to work on my game.
you can hide the transition with some kind of entry into atmosphere animation that obscures vision a bit but lasts for a short time like a kind of generic burning effect or rush of wind or clouds or something.
Robin Bono Because clouds are always moving. Kinda unrealistic when the edge of the cubefaces always is cloudy. And second, clouds are normally 5 km altitude, not 500 km.
@@1234macro Well there is no actual "solution" in the sense of entirely removing distortion because that is mathematically impossible. So since the distortion is going to be there regardless, might as well make sure it's as invisible as possible
I see an orbit around the planet at the end! Could that be a secret feature? Mhm... Anyways, great work Ben! (and SoA team) I hope this summer you can release a build of the current progress! :D
Have you tried using a cylinder with two polar faces? With that, the entire equator is warp-free, which is a lot more space than 4 face centres spread out, and the polar faces mean you don't get the lack-of-poles problem. Also, 3 faces in total instead of 6. (I assume you've tried that, I'm just curious what the problems were)
@@DubstepCoder It looks like you are still alive, make some update video or something about your life and like what's going on. You haven't uploaded for a while. Really love your videos on c++ and game programming. Stay home and stay safe.Peace
@@siddharthasarmah9266 Thanks for the kind words, at this point probably am not going to upload anything unless I think its something people would really enjoy, and I don't think most people would care much about my personal life right now.
+Anna Harren I talk about the cylinder approach as a reply to this comment on reddit: I haven't tried the second cylinder approach, but it might be cool too! www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/303smv/technical_explanation_of_new_round_voxel_planet/cpoxnib
In the worse case scenario at about 7:20, one possible solution would be to add post processing effects that would distract enough from the size change. If you look at the NMS clip, the sky becomes much brighter and "noisier" and washed out during transition, probably to account not only for a worst case scenario but also to simulate what atmospheric entry would look like.
Use RTC rendering and double precision to get rid of the precision loss thing. Move the object to the camera so that big numbers will cancel themselves out and use double precision for position objects. When sending the data to the GPU you could easily cast the doubles to floats.
+DoctorPC pelailut most of the discussion on gameplay goes on in the forums, but we will be releasing videos talking about gameplay design soonish! There will be SP and MP, similar to how Minecraft works with SMP, but there will be several gamemodes in MP to choose from. And yes we are going to try to do some background macro and micro-simulation of the environment.
Ben Arnold Keep up the good work guys! Just an FYI If you haven't already found out yet (you probably have) No mans sky uses Voxels for the data of the planet but generates a polygonal representation of that to display and interact with, it does not have actual Voxels in the game world. It also generates the Voxels procedurally on the fly, and bases the next Voxels on the previous ones and some other data about the solar system and the planet and so forth. It also has 3 different levels of Voxels to speed this process up and make sure useless terrain isn't generated (so it doesn't have to create every bit of land you fly high over) It will be easier for them to have fully round planets because of their polygonal approach I think, not that the problem can't be solved with Voxels too. Have you heard of Voxel quest, i think it is called, by Gavan? It also uses some on the fly random generation instead of generating the world first. I think he is having a lot of trouble with performance though, because Voxels can be a nuisance to display . Either way good luck with this project, It's been a while since we could fly around a full planet in a complete game.
***** Yes sorry about that, development has stalled right now. We aren't making any money on SoA so weve all had to turn to jobs and school. We will still be developing the game as a hobby but it's not likely to be playable in the near future.
Ben Arnold Sorry to hear, but I sincerely wish you good luck in at least keeping the project alive, and hopefully in a state of steady, maybe slow, but steady, progress. I rather have you work slower than work hungry :)
I know this is kind of a old video but I wanted to know your thoughts when you mentioned no man’s sky and how they were possibly mapping their worlds I think they’re doing it a lot differently now because in the old trailers everything would fully transition and the plants were full generated from space, but now if you look at current gameplay the planets are no longer that way anymore.
I think that works really well. Is the area of the lake really changing or is it simply that the perspective is changing? If its just a perspective thing you could actually hide the problem by adding reentry effects around this ship and nobody will ever know. Unless there is no air at a planet then there are no reentry effects of course...
I've thought about this before, I would just make each voxel sort of an upside down pyramid that gets smaller and smaller towards the center. But the center is filled with like an isometric sphere of lava. In real life, Earth is like a ball of lava wrapped in a thin tissue of rock. So there is no need to think about how to do the center anyway, the player would never get to it. Or you could do the same thing but the cubes don't get smaller as you go down, each layer is just offset, like bricks. All of this would be really hard though haha I'm currently working on a voxel game myself in Unity. Or you just use marching cube and have players stand on the diagonals of cubes haha
Marching cubes is better, pyramid shape has been done before and it has lots of warping that you would not expect. Think about it, you are still mapping squares to a sphere with an upside down pyramid, so there is gonna be issues. Different parts of the sphere end up having different shaped voxels.
@@DubstepCoder Oh ya I didn't think of that. Why can't you like, project a bunch of evenly spaced dots onto a sphere and then use those as vertices? It would evenly distribute the warping, wouldn't it? Or cast rays out evenly in many directions from the planet's center and use points along those rays as vertices.
@@tristunalekzander5608 evenly spacing points isn't a hard problem, nor is it useful for this. Evenly spacing voxel data with no warping is a different problem. Games like no mans sky simply use cubic voxel data and represent the mesh via dual contouring which makes any warping pretty hard to notice, but if you use your scanner on a resource node in no mans sky you will see the warping of the underlying grid.
@@DubstepCoder Well it's a hard problem for me haha, why can't you just use interpolation and smooth it out so players don't notice they are standing on the diagonal edge of a voxel in some places?
Honestly the way I would have probably attempted to do it is to imagine the world not as a cube or a torus, but as a flat square with two sides, like one of those maps of earth that show a front and back half. I think mapping it to a sphere for a view in space would be easier if you did tricks to make sure the same part of the sphere was always facing the camera and the origin for the coordinates shifted around the sphere shape instead. But I really don't know that much about computer graphics so eh.
transition distortion on entering and leaving the atmosphere can be combined with heat and ionization effects to obfuscate what little remains of the distortion....yay realism
Hello! I have been following this project for.. a few months now?. The tech looks really promising, but I still have no idea what the game itself will be about. Single player, online or even a sudo MMO? Main things is surviving, manufacturing or building decorative stuff? Will there be any "background simulation" (in quotes, because what I mean is not the most traditional way of thinking of BS. Rather things like planets' orbits, etc.). Questions after this would be so heavily reliant on the answers to the ones above, I would have to make a set for each case, creating an exponential growth of time used for writing & reading this comment, so I will leave them off for now.
This looks great. I noticed that you go a lot further forward when transitioning, what happens if you transition while walking on the ground? I am also interested in to see more about what it will look like when you are on the ground. Looking forward to see player made construction/destruction showing up on the far terrain too.
When you are on the ground, it fades out and switches you to a different voxel grid. So a house right on the edge will not be visible from an adjacent face most likely! As for far terrain constructions showing up, that is a problem that we have yet to solve, and there are other more important things we need to work on with our limited dev time right now, but you can be sure we will be looking into ways to do it!
re a hero.. nicely done and u r right in my opinon.. this transition doesnt matter.. real life also has his visual fakes.. so it even looks more natural.. well done keep going.. me and my bro are waiting for the release or beta.. other question.. why it isnt on steam.. like giving you some money push...
Alternate approach: Don't even try to treat the surface as a plane. Build the planet in a huge cubical grid, so you end up looking at the corners of the ground cubes when you look down in the right places. Gravity would be from a point-source located at the planet's centre, rather than a constant y-axis force. Potential objections: 1. Huge memory requirement for naive implementation. True. Use nested grids instead. Load in or generate whatever grid-levels and sub-grids are actually needed for what's going on near the player. Most of the potential grids would lie inside the planet and never get generated. Most of the rest would be empty space and could be encoded as a high-level cell containing the "empty space" value. 2. Cube corners pointing "up" would create obstacles for the player. Depends on how big the cubes are at the smallest scale. At 1m per voxel? Yeah, going to make hard-to-traverse terrain in the parts of the planet below the grid's corners. At 10mm per voxel? Your footprint is going to cover a few hundred of them. 100mm might be a happy medium. 3. Might make construction hard for the player. I'd bet you'd get players who deliberately land in those kinds of areas just for the challenge of building stuff where you can't get perfectly smooth vertical walls. 4. Would make stuff like conveyor belts impossible in some places. Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how they're implemented.
And Ben could you use some atmospheric effects to cover up the planetary entry distortion? So basically when someone enters the planet, have some re-entry heat/flames that simply makes the player not notice (or less likely to notice) the changes?
Ben Arnold Ah yes, those darn non-atmospheric planets. Anyways, I would imagine that people would be worried about not crashing their spaceships to really notice the changing size, and it's not a big problem in my opinion. On an unrelated note, any news on the 0.2.0 demo? Not trying to rush you, just patiently waiting and wondering :D (All the new content posted on the website is so completely awesome)
Ben Arnold Oh, and have you thought about what will happen when large scale changes are made to the terrain? A man-made river, a town/city, massive craters from nuclear explosions, etc. Is there an efficient way to update the background mesh/heightmap?
crazylamb452 0.2.0 demo should be out this Sunday! And wee have though about man made changes to the terrain and have some ideas for implementation, but haven't started work on it yet.
Hey Ben thanks for the video and great job. But have you ideas for the change of the landscape? I mean when one destroys a complete mountain, the world mesh wont change. That would be an little issue ;)
Yes that is definitely an issue. The easiest way would be to cache the highest voxel and use it when generating the heightmap terrain, but this is an issue we aren't quite focusing on yet since we are working on other things we think are more important. We will figure something out, don't worry!
Something in me tells me no and suspects you would've already thought of this, but can you choose a part of a tourus other than the inner ring, or for that matter perhaps even any random spot and it's opposite spot (though I like to think somewhere on the outer ring), though as I think more I don't think that gives quite the desired effect... at all... half tourus... no, ok I'll just continue watching.
Stuff getting bigger as you get closer to the land doesn't really seem like a big deal if you do it smoothly (it's supposed to get bigger anyway). -- Even if we notice it, we'll just mentally write it off. :)
Hmm, lol. I should join your group here then. I wish I knew you were working on this. I also attempted this problem in the past as well and it took me a while to solve it. I'm currently learning c++ and opengl.
I have no idea where you are getting golden ratio as the distortion here. I'd love if you could show your work. It would help me on a project. I'm not sure what you mean by mapping toroidal maps onto spheres either, because that doesn't seem to make sense.
Just an idea: have alternate habitable stellar bodies. Things like a disc world, ring world, Dyson sphere, etc. Projection on a ring should be much, much easier, and scrith makes for an excellent impenetrable bedrock material. ;) Would also be a natural fit for having discrete biomes spread linearly around the ring. A Dyson sphere would have the inverse problem. A disc world has some interesting gravitational artifacts.
unless you mean voxel the size of a pixel, no you cant. Not without problems somewhere, unless you use an isosurface extraction method like dual contouring.
@@DubstepCoder You're right, later I realized about the problem with gravity... There would be no problem if they were spheres instead of cubes, but that would be a very different aesthetic.
Okay... So as the game is growing cooler and more complex everyday, I really feel like I should send some money to help it grow a lil faster. So as soon as I have some again, Ill make sure to do so. However. I also have a question about physics. The game runs well for me. I have that "too far" option turned on and everything is on high and still have nice fps (around 100 in normal situations and when there is lots of particles and such stuff..) But! My physics fps. They sux. And I dont understand why? Am I right when I say that physics is being processed by CPU or is it just gpu as well? I dont understand these things at all but I know some games wont let me use all my cpu cores. So. As I have a quad core cpu... Am I using all of em for SoA or just one or woot? Also, would it be possible to use Nvidia Cuda cores or however are they called for physics in this game? I want mooore physics. I want to spawn oceans, I WANT TO BE GOD, MUHAHAHAA! Thanks for your answer c:
Thanks for your support! You won't be able to send us any money yet, we want to be sure the engine is ready and we can actually work full time before we take any funding. As for the physics FPS, it is purely CPU, and in 0.1.6, on too far mode the CPU is doing too much work. We have optimized multithreading in the next build and are working to make the physics FPS run faster on all machines!
Ben Arnold Cool! I cant wait to play around in it more. And especially to see how the worlds of SoA are getting more and more filled with life. Hopefully everything goes well for you :). And also. Will it be later possible to see like... structures, cities / changes in terrain or anything that player changed from really far away? I mean even further then the blocks start (or end)... Basically... Will I be able to see cities I built from space or really far away? If I make em really really huge ofc. I think that is for now the only thing that seems kinda unfinished. Oh.. and the black water maybe xD. But seriously... Youre doing a great job and when its possible, I will try to support you as much as I can. Gj, keep it up :)
Tommi & Liam Thanks! We are still trying to figure out the best way to display edits on the far terrain. The easiest way would be to just modify the heightmap with the highest voxel, but it won't look good for cities. We will figure something out! Probably a generated LOD model of buildings that gets displayed on the terrain.
I know the game is dead but I’m not sure if I understand the method correctly. Are you transitioning to a flat voxel world that is distorted around the player? If so how does that solve the problem of having to rotate chunks?
Neat -- I just learned about this projects and it looks great! Have you figured out how you'll be storing several planets worth of voxel data yet onto the hard drive? I'd imagine that its going to be huge!
With enough cubes, small enough, from far enough away, they should all be able to sit edge to edge in a clump without needing to map to a sphere object. Is that outside the realm of realtime computation?
At that point there's no reason to use cubes, instead you would just use triangles like any normal real time planet renderer, but yes you can voxellize a sphere regardless of voxel size.
And for this kind of rendering/storage, yes it is outside the realm of possibility. A sparse voxel octree with dual contoured rendering would work better in that case.
Very nice looking, I'm entirely fine with the growing terrain problem, and in fact, I want to say something real quick, how deep are worlds going to be in this game? (I hit about, 100 Million Blocks downwards, without any game problems, no idea how. (well, problems as in big big ones, I left the other side of the planet, and lighting broke, but dam, Minecraft only goes to 64 down. So, yeah.))
You will probably be able to dig till you get past the mantle, then there will be a barrier of lava and high pressure that kills you if you try to go deeper! But that's still REALLY deep.
Scaled coordinate spaces, the space system is on a different, scaled coordinate system compared to local space for each planet. Same thing pretty much every space sim does.
If 64 bit generation is faster on the GPU than the CPU then planet generation is going to be very fast. My issue was that only 32 bit floats were widely supported on GPUs which isn't good enough for full scale planets.
Gah! was worth a shot. I figures with being closer to spheroidal the distortion might be less apparent. Either way, it looks like you are taking the genre in a great direction. 👍
Ben, how long you programmed before this project? I'm a computer science student and I have always wanted to work with voxel engines and games... but seems quite impossible when you speak about those problems you had. =(
It is really hard, and it takes a very long time, but that is not a reason to not try! there are still many years ahead for this project, but it, along with a CS degree landed me a job in the game industry yesterday! make the game you want to make, and be passionate about it, and I promise you will go far.
I have been watching this back and forth and I struggle to understand just how it is supposed to work at 4:16 in the video, with separate regions with transitions. Won't there still be an issue with the corners of the cube? I mean, wouldn't there be some duplicated geometry and such? Or is there some kind of "skip" at the borders so you move far into the new side of the cube?
Mikael Isaksson Each cube face is literally a separate infinite plane that extends outward indefinitely. You simply teleport to a new plane at the edge, so there is no corner issue.
Ben Arnold So, when you are standing at the corner, just before you get teleported. What terrain is rendered in the neighbouring terrain you actually don't reach because of teleporting? I get the teleporting, I don't get what gets rendered just before that point :). Is it possible to build a continous structure across planes? That will be visible? Edit: In the cube scenario a flat area wraps at the corner so it gets weird at the corner, but in your infinite plane scenario, what happens to that wrap? In my head you still would need something to fill that "empty space" with. Say you are at the north east corner. North is easy, another plane, east is easy, another plane. But north east? That one used to be a weird corner. Is that empty space now? Blurred horizon? What?
Mikael Isaksson We render the infinite plane you are currently standing on, but all infinite planes draw their voxels from the spherical world positions as if we "squished" them onto the sphere. If you are at the north side, the terrain will look very similar to the northern face, but when you cross the edge you are teleported to a new plane that is a bit different. Same thing happens at the corners. Its designed so that you can't actually cross directly over the corner, you will be forced to teleport to one of the two corner faces.
What does it look like if you stand next to the corner and look at it at ground level? Can you see the point where three voxels meet instead of four? If not, where does the illusory fourth voxel come from?
tntiscool54 I'm pretty sure It's one of the community suggestions that we ended up really liking. It sort of spawns from the idea that Seed of Andromeda is rethinking the way voxels are used in a video game, and it also fits the theme of the game since you need to rebuild society after crash landing. EDIT: It was suggested by Anthony Keeton AKA Damion Rayne
th-cam.com/video/joFWr3JzBOI/w-d-xo.html -- This video covers how cubes will be distorted if converted to cartesian coordinates, and how complex numbers can be used to create an imaginary axis that allows all blocks to maintain equal aspect ratio. The problem here is cubes still get larger the further they go from the center of the sphere. Now that is an option, but I just don't think that cubes will cut it. I think that perhaps it is best to use triangulated voxels, you could do so much more with them while still being able to have the ability to build homes and dig. I genuinely think that is the absolute best route, because there are some extreme distortion problems with using cubes. They'd be sections of the radius, technically, and would have to possess atleast slight roundness.
Just a weird thought, but what if the planet was a NURBS object, a procedural object that would change resolution and geometry, on the fly, according to the needs of engine. So you don't have any real issues with transition from face to face, at least as far as mapping goes. Way have fixed faces.
DocWolph That would work well, but not if you want to save the voxel data and load it from the hard drive. I have seen similar uses of proceduraly generated terrain before, It actually looks really good, but becomes really slow after you change too much geometry, because instead of being able to generate the geometry on the fly it has to load it in, which also makes the world file size a lot bigger as well. Working with Vowels can be a nightmare to be honest, a standard 1080p image is 7 megabytes, so just imagine how much more data is created when you add another dimension to that file size, it almost comes up to a few gigabytes!
Bungis Albondigas I'm probably being too simple, but why not just procedurally generate a 2d map of the land scape. May off-line programs, like Terragen, World Machine, and Vue, do this. This would be no different that a DX11 tessellation map, except you are going with voxels and not strictly polygons. At the start I know this would preclude caves, overhangs and the like. Anything that is not. However, it could be doing in contour map layers,but literally could be much smoother, depending on need. Too fine a progression and you might as well be using voxels anyway, but it would follow the curvature of the world with no distortion. Otherwise you can make set calculated assumptions, that would allow a predictable in-fill of voxels or polygons, as some engines will do. But using voxels to inform the polygons. Voxel engines, by necessity, have to be procedural, so relying on sheer horsepower and/or RAM space means you aren't doing it right. Contour mapping with image and displacement textures to make procedural assumptions that result in completed landscapes without distort and using very little RAM. Then we will need to start talking about foliage, atmosphere and water.
DocWolph You could always use multiple layers for the caves and overhangs if you don't have many in the planet, assuming you are using a height map instead of the Voxels themselves. Still, It's nice to have a fully 3D world like mine craft to dig into as well.
How does this solve the problems with the corners? Don't you still have the problem that you are able to make a 90°,90°,90° triangle on a sphere which you should be able to shrink down to a triangle just a few blocks per side. It might not be a problem with generated terrain, but once a player starts to mess about I would think the problem would get apparent.
The corner problem is solved because each plane is actually independent. We treat each plane as an infinite plane in X and Z, and just transition you to a new one once you cross a boundary
Ben Arnold But in the corners you have 3 planes meeting in a single point. On the edges you can map two half-planes to a plane, but how do you map 3 quarter-planes to a plane in a way that is consistent?
Kalmakka We don't treat it like 3 planes meeting. We actually extend the plane you are on infinitely in all directions, we pretend there isn't even a corner, and we just transport you to a new plane once you cross the invisible edge boundary.
Hey everyone the game is dead. I'm working on something new now that I have almost a decade of experience, but I'm balancing that with a AAA career so will be a few years until I post anything about it. Until then, subscribe and maybe you will see a video from me pop into your feed in a few years.
2 weeks ago yo??????????
Is there anything left we can play? I just found this now.
this project of yours was a huge inspiration to me back in the day. i wish you the best of luck with ur current and future projects
@@thimization I don't think so sorry! The github has a version you can build locally and run but its only the solar system
@@DubstepCoder yes! dont give up
You've created by far the most technically impressive voxel games I've ever seen. It's truly inspiring.
2:14 Same thing on Earth at the Bermuda triangle. Lots of strange phenomena happening where the seams meet.
lol
Lol!
I have seen way too many conspiracy videos where people use projection artifacts in Google Maps (on Earth, the Moon, or on Mars) to "prove" there's a hole to the centre of the Earth, a coverup on the Moon, or life on Mars, etc. People be crazy, and math be hard.
GothAlice Yeah, afaik the Bermuda triangle gained notoriety because of a single spectacular case, but doesn't otherwise stand out as being the location of a lot of accidents. The myth just stuck :)
Yeah agree
Wow that distortion was way more serious than I thought. It causes motion sickness!
Great work!
Yeah it was ABSOLUTELY horrible. SO glad its gone.
my guy is still responding after 7 years
It Looks a lot better than before keep up the good work
Glad you like it, cause I wasn't about to revert back to the old method xD
Ben Arnold this can be a big big game in the up coming years.OMG IS THAT AWSOME!!!!!!!!!!! ;D
Ben Arnold don't worry you can do this, you have a great chance ;D
This game looks sooo freaking promising. Please please please keep at it!
The only way for me to NOT keep at it would be for me to die, so don't worry!
Ben Arnold Ahah, good to know it! Wish you to have a long life ;D
Lionitowk
Haha me too :P
You sir, rock!
Oh crap, if game continues developing as slow as it does now, Ben should have longer lifespan than a normal human.
Wish you luck with SoA, and a faster development speed, or atleast a longer lifespan for you guys, and me.
I want to see release of SoA and Half-Life 3.
Wow! Everything looks amazing! Can't believe just a few years ago I would watch you programming this in class :') brings tears to my eyes!
Haha thanks a bunch Paul! (Paul is a CS buddy at uni)
Awesome work, I wouldn't worry about peoples views on distortion, navigators and cartographers had a very similar problem when designing naval mapping haha. The reason for so many different styles of map is in determining what is important to the reader, whether it's proportionality or accuracy of distance.
For anyone who wants another take at spherical planets, take a look at the development of PlanetSmith :)
It's ongoing and doesn't use cubes but hexagonal blocks.
I've discovered your project like a month ago while looking on how to do properly various things in a voxel game engine ( especially the lightning propagation, huge thanks for making a reddit post on that ! ). And I gotta say that this is, by far, the best and the most promising blocky space-sim game I have ever saw, and if such a game is vowed to success then SoA should be that one. Cheers from a lazy 18 years-old belgian programmer.
***** Thanks for the support, and I am glad one of my blogs was useful to you! I have to agree that this game is promising. There's just SO much potential here, which is why I am so damn excited about making it! Plus building worlds is pretty fun...
Ben Arnold I played Minecraft for *years* and I always have been a bit frustrated with it's limited engine and lack of new content ( and lately their shitty politics ). That's why I started modding it and this year I eventually came to start working on my own cube game. I played a bit starmade back when it was a thing and the concept was nice but executed quite poorly. On the side of it SoA seems to have the best/most advanced/fastest voxel engine out there, you've got a really good base to work on. IMO for it to succeed what it will need is a nice gameplay and mountains of content. It's clearly the most ambitious voxel game I heard of ( if not game as a whole in terms of sheer size and possibilities ). Also keep doing these technical blogs posts, it's always interesting to read.
***** There will be lots more techincal posts to come, and don't worry, we have lots of great ideas for gameplay and content :)
Shout out to TH-cam showing me someone else’s attempt at solving the SPECIFIC problem with many of the same specific details I have been pondering the past few days! Awesome videos on here, bummer I’m years too late. Hope all has been going well for you!
Never too late :) maybe you will succeed where I failed!
Once you can generate entire planets from the very beginning and get space to planetary landings figured out, you can do ANYTHING with that engine.
That is something frontier developments did not get right.
Goobli bloo! Their focus is more on space exploration, where ours is more on planetary exploration.
I understand that but I would be extremely surprised if they managed to shoe horn in planetary landings at this point.
Goobli bloo! Me too!
Goobli bloo! They did it before though in their other games, so David has the pedigree. It's just a matter of time, or interest in the landings.
as a beginner in game dev this video made my jaw drop. Impressive stuff dude!
+Ben Arnold I know this is an old video, but I was going to say, if some camera shaking was added, due to entering atmosphere ;), then you could hide the change in size/position of the landscape features, not sure about exiting the planet, but I feel most people would be looking to space while exiting.
Man. This is amazing, I always wished Minecraft did this with all the different planets.
Man this is actually awesomely impressive, I hope one day this gets picked up again somehow
It won't. Im working on something new now that I have almost a decade of experience, but im balancing that with a AAA career so will be a few years until I post anything about it.
@@DubstepCoder ah makes sense, tho this thing is open source right?
So like anybody can just pick it up and make something of it if they want possibly?
@@scruffles3838 Yep! good luck though lol
@@DubstepCoder good to know!
I might have been tempted to use parametric coordinates to create oddly shaped cubes that get smaller towards to core of the planet (think pie slices). However, if the planet is large enough, it would have looked fine.
Nice update. Glad to see this project still alive.
This was really interesting to watch!
This is amazing... I love how the scale of the planet and how it looks from space. Keep it up!
Okay so I’m really impressed by this game, and I plan to mess around with the source code to get a better understanding of this, but I’ll be honest I was so upset when I found this channel…
I have had an extremely similar idea for a block game where you can build a ship and travel between other blocky planets. My game idea is far simpler than this however, as I didn’t plan on having like realistic orbits and a massive solar system to explore, I was really thinking of the planets in my game as an equivalent to dimensions in Minecraft, so there would only be like 2 or 3 planets to travel between each with their own mobs, world generation, etc. but the method you guys were doing with SoA for full planet scale generation was pretty much exactly how I imagined doing it when I got around to working on my game. Tho I would have just had a single massive plane that you loop around, PAC-MAN style (that would make things like coordinates weird if I didn’t manage it properly, but I still think that’s how I would do it regardless). Then of course when you fly out into space, I’d do some rendering trickery to make the planet appear to be spherical, tho I don’t really know how I’d do that other than mapping the plane to a sphere based on what direction you’re looking at the world, so avoid the player seeing any distortion, but as a new programmer I am not sure how I would do that.
But yeah, all and all this is awesome stuff. I know this project is done with, but I am still grateful for the work you guys have done on this amazing looking game and I thank you for the inspiration and the motivation to work on my game.
you can hide the transition with some kind of entry into atmosphere animation that obscures vision a bit but lasts for a short time like a kind of generic burning effect or rush of wind or clouds or something.
I really enjoyed this video. I like how you show how you solve all these complex geometric problems. look forward to seeing more content!
What happened? This video came to my recommended right now and I found it amazing but there are no new videos...
that the cycle of life for these types of channels.
How the hell was this 8 years ago...
Excelent video. Very good job with the illustrations.
Why not make sure the player are inside clouds when the transition occurs at edges?
Excellent suggestion
That's called a hack, not a solution
Robin Bono
Because clouds are always moving. Kinda unrealistic when the edge of the cubefaces always is cloudy. And second, clouds are normally 5 km altitude, not 500 km.
@@1234macro Well there is no actual "solution" in the sense of entirely removing distortion because that is mathematically impossible. So since the distortion is going to be there regardless, might as well make sure it's as invisible as possible
I see an orbit around the planet at the end! Could that be a secret feature? Mhm...
Anyways, great work Ben! (and SoA team) I hope this summer you can release a build of the current progress! :D
Secret feature? I don't know what you are talking about ;)
Hahaha
You blew my mind with the new terrain and textures!
Have you tried using a cylinder with two polar faces? With that, the entire equator is warp-free, which is a lot more space than 4 face centres spread out, and the polar faces mean you don't get the lack-of-poles problem. Also, 3 faces in total instead of 6.
(I assume you've tried that, I'm just curious what the problems were)
Why is youtube showing me videos about a game that is basically dead?
Hell if I know dude
@@DubstepCoder It looks like you are still alive, make some update video or something about your life and like what's going on. You haven't uploaded for a while. Really love your videos on c++ and game programming. Stay home and stay safe.Peace
@@siddharthasarmah9266 Thanks for the kind words, at this point probably am not going to upload anything unless I think its something people would really enjoy, and I don't think most people would care much about my personal life right now.
@@DubstepCoder No worries bro, it's all ok.
@@DubstepCoder I am really happy just to see your reply. It has been a long time you have been inactive.
+Anna Harren I talk about the cylinder approach as a reply to this comment on reddit: I haven't tried the second cylinder approach, but it might be cool too! www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/303smv/technical_explanation_of_new_round_voxel_planet/cpoxnib
So glad to see a new video :) Good job Ben !
In the worse case scenario at about 7:20, one possible solution would be to add post processing effects that would distract enough from the size change. If you look at the NMS clip, the sky becomes much brighter and "noisier" and washed out during transition, probably to account not only for a worst case scenario but also to simulate what atmospheric entry would look like.
ZeroSwordsMaster Yes we will probably do a lot of experimentation with different effects to mask the shift :)
Looks very interesting I like the mesh to blocks system you have
Use RTC rendering and double precision to get rid of the precision loss thing. Move the object to the camera so that big numbers will cancel themselves out and use double precision for position objects. When sending the data to the GPU you could easily cast the doubles to floats.
Would love to see what you can do now! Smooth / photorealsitic minecraft would be amazing. Enshrouded is close but not quite there.
+DoctorPC pelailut most of the discussion on gameplay goes on in the forums, but we will be releasing videos talking about gameplay design soonish! There will be SP and MP, similar to how Minecraft works with SMP, but there will be several gamemodes in MP to choose from. And yes we are going to try to do some background macro and micro-simulation of the environment.
Looks like I never got to the answer :/. Good I found it manually :P. I will now head to the forums then.
Ben Arnold
Keep up the good work guys!
Just an FYI If you haven't already found out yet (you probably have) No mans sky uses Voxels for the data of the planet but generates a polygonal representation of that to display and interact with, it does not have actual Voxels in the game world.
It also generates the Voxels procedurally on the fly, and bases the next Voxels on the previous ones and some other data about the solar system and the planet and so forth. It also has 3 different levels of Voxels to speed this process up and make sure useless terrain isn't generated (so it doesn't have to create every bit of land you fly high over)
It will be easier for them to have fully round planets because of their polygonal approach I think, not that the problem can't be solved with Voxels too.
Have you heard of Voxel quest, i think it is called, by Gavan? It also uses some on the fly random generation instead of generating the world first. I think he is having a lot of trouble with performance though, because Voxels can be a nuisance to display .
Either way good luck with this project, It's been a while since we could fly around a full planet in a complete game.
+sos luxe Thats all it is at the moment.
***** Yes sorry about that, development has stalled right now. We aren't making any money on SoA so weve all had to turn to jobs and school. We will still be developing the game as a hobby but it's not likely to be playable in the near future.
Ben Arnold Sorry to hear, but I sincerely wish you good luck in at least keeping the project alive, and hopefully in a state of steady, maybe slow, but steady, progress. I rather have you work slower than work hungry :)
How did you end up handling corners with this new method? For some reason I imagine you would still run into the issues at 2:08.
I know this is kind of a old video but I wanted to know your thoughts when you mentioned no man’s sky and how they were possibly mapping their worlds I think they’re doing it a lot differently now because in the old trailers everything would fully transition and the plants were full generated from space, but now if you look at current gameplay the planets are no longer that way anymore.
I didn't know of this project, but damn, that looks amazing!
I think that works really well. Is the area of the lake really changing or is it simply that the perspective is changing? If its just a perspective thing you could actually hide the problem by adding reentry effects around this ship and nobody will ever know.
Unless there is no air at a planet then there are no reentry effects of course...
The area is indeed literally changing.
Ben Arnold
So if you were to build on the edge of that lake your base would get destroyed?
GenJeFT
Ah sorry, the area of the HEIGHTMAP terrain is changing, not the area of the voxels. Voxel area is constant.
Ah.
I came over this video just now. Checked your channel, and I found your latest upload was over two years ago. Is this project alive?
I've thought about this before, I would just make each voxel sort of an upside down pyramid that gets smaller and smaller towards the center. But the center is filled with like an isometric sphere of lava. In real life, Earth is like a ball of lava wrapped in a thin tissue of rock. So there is no need to think about how to do the center anyway, the player would never get to it. Or you could do the same thing but the cubes don't get smaller as you go down, each layer is just offset, like bricks. All of this would be really hard though haha I'm currently working on a voxel game myself in Unity. Or you just use marching cube and have players stand on the diagonals of cubes haha
Marching cubes is better, pyramid shape has been done before and it has lots of warping that you would not expect. Think about it, you are still mapping squares to a sphere with an upside down pyramid, so there is gonna be issues. Different parts of the sphere end up having different shaped voxels.
@@DubstepCoder Oh ya I didn't think of that. Why can't you like, project a bunch of evenly spaced dots onto a sphere and then use those as vertices? It would evenly distribute the warping, wouldn't it? Or cast rays out evenly in many directions from the planet's center and use points along those rays as vertices.
@@tristunalekzander5608 evenly spacing points isn't a hard problem, nor is it useful for this. Evenly spacing voxel data with no warping is a different problem. Games like no mans sky simply use cubic voxel data and represent the mesh via dual contouring which makes any warping pretty hard to notice, but if you use your scanner on a resource node in no mans sky you will see the warping of the underlying grid.
@@DubstepCoder Well it's a hard problem for me haha, why can't you just use interpolation and smooth it out so players don't notice they are standing on the diagonal edge of a voxel in some places?
Honestly the way I would have probably attempted to do it is to imagine the world not as a cube or a torus, but as a flat square with two sides, like one of those maps of earth that show a front and back half. I think mapping it to a sphere for a view in space would be easier if you did tricks to make sure the same part of the sphere was always facing the camera and the origin for the coordinates shifted around the sphere shape instead. But I really don't know that much about computer graphics so eh.
transition distortion on entering and leaving the atmosphere can be combined with heat and ionization effects to obfuscate what little remains of the distortion....yay realism
Torus world blew my mind thats crazy
Dude, you are awesome at your job.
Looking good I agree with WatcherOfShadows. Keep at it.
What ever happened to this project?
Hello! I have been following this project for.. a few months now?. The tech looks really promising, but I still have no idea what the game itself will be about. Single player, online or even a sudo MMO? Main things is surviving, manufacturing or building decorative stuff? Will there be any "background simulation" (in quotes, because what I mean is not the most traditional way of thinking of BS. Rather things like planets' orbits, etc.). Questions after this would be so heavily reliant on the answers to the ones above, I would have to make a set for each case, creating an exponential growth of time used for writing & reading this comment, so I will leave them off for now.
This looks great.
I noticed that you go a lot further forward when transitioning, what happens if you transition while walking on the ground?
I am also interested in to see more about what it will look like when you are on the ground.
Looking forward to see player made construction/destruction showing up on the far terrain too.
When you are on the ground, it fades out and switches you to a different voxel grid. So a house right on the edge will not be visible from an adjacent face most likely!
As for far terrain constructions showing up, that is a problem that we have yet to solve, and there are other more important things we need to work on with our limited dev time right now, but you can be sure we will be looking into ways to do it!
re a hero.. nicely done and u r right in my opinon.. this transition doesnt matter.. real life also has his visual fakes.. so it even looks more natural.. well done keep going.. me and my bro are waiting for the release or beta..
other question.. why it isnt on steam.. like giving you some money push...
We will eventually put it on steam, but right now we are just focusing on getting the engine up to par.
Just subbed looks promising!!! Awesome vid
For the transitioning from space to planet and vice-verse, just add clouds in the atmosphere and it will not be noticeable almot at all.
That works for some planets, but not all planets will have clouds or even atmospheres!
Alternate approach: Don't even try to treat the surface as a plane. Build the planet in a huge cubical grid, so you end up looking at the corners of the ground cubes when you look down in the right places. Gravity would be from a point-source located at the planet's centre, rather than a constant y-axis force.
Potential objections:
1. Huge memory requirement for naive implementation. True. Use nested grids instead. Load in or generate whatever grid-levels and sub-grids are actually needed for what's going on near the player. Most of the potential grids would lie inside the planet and never get generated. Most of the rest would be empty space and could be encoded as a high-level cell containing the "empty space" value.
2. Cube corners pointing "up" would create obstacles for the player. Depends on how big the cubes are at the smallest scale. At 1m per voxel? Yeah, going to make hard-to-traverse terrain in the parts of the planet below the grid's corners. At 10mm per voxel? Your footprint is going to cover a few hundred of them. 100mm might be a happy medium.
3. Might make construction hard for the player. I'd bet you'd get players who deliberately land in those kinds of areas just for the challenge of building stuff where you can't get perfectly smooth vertical walls.
4. Would make stuff like conveyor belts impossible in some places. Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how they're implemented.
that last part soo beautiful
It's gonna get a lot more beautiful, this is a very rough version!
great.
And Ben could you use some atmospheric effects to cover up the planetary entry distortion? So basically when someone enters the planet, have some re-entry heat/flames that simply makes the player not notice (or less likely to notice) the changes?
crazylamb452 Absolutely, thought this might only be convincing for planets that actually have atmospheres.
Ben Arnold Ah yes, those darn non-atmospheric planets. Anyways, I would imagine that people would be worried about not crashing their spaceships to really notice the changing size, and it's not a big problem in my opinion.
On an unrelated note, any news on the 0.2.0 demo? Not trying to rush you, just patiently waiting and wondering :D (All the new content posted on the website is so completely awesome)
Ben Arnold Oh, and have you thought about what will happen when large scale changes are made to the terrain? A man-made river, a town/city, massive craters from nuclear explosions, etc. Is there an efficient way to update the background mesh/heightmap?
crazylamb452 0.2.0 demo should be out this Sunday! And wee have though about man made changes to the terrain and have some ideas for implementation, but haven't started work on it yet.
What the fuck is this the algorithm has blessed me with another decade old voxel engine
Thanks for your video, as ever good work !
Hey Ben thanks for the video and great job. But have you ideas for the change of the landscape? I mean when one destroys a complete mountain, the world mesh wont change. That would be an little issue ;)
Yes that is definitely an issue. The easiest way would be to cache the highest voxel and use it when generating the heightmap terrain, but this is an issue we aren't quite focusing on yet since we are working on other things we think are more important. We will figure something out, don't worry!
Wow dude! Amazing!! Really. How did I not know about this? Someone in the No Man's Sky community. I have feeling that they are going to like it!
Something in me tells me no and suspects you would've already thought of this, but can you choose a part of a tourus other than the inner ring, or for that matter perhaps even any random spot and it's opposite spot (though I like to think somewhere on the outer ring), though as I think more I don't think that gives quite the desired effect... at all... half tourus... no, ok I'll just continue watching.
Stuff getting bigger as you get closer to the land doesn't really seem like a big deal if you do it smoothly (it's supposed to get bigger anyway). -- Even if we notice it, we'll just mentally write it off. :)
i wonder why you didn't stack the blocks in a sphere like shape made more sense to me but might be harder idk
Hmm, lol. I should join your group here then. I wish I knew you were working on this. I also attempted this problem in the past as well and it took me a while to solve it. I'm currently learning c++ and opengl.
I have no idea where you are getting golden ratio as the distortion here. I'd love if you could show your work. It would help me on a project.
I'm not sure what you mean by mapping toroidal maps onto spheres either, because that doesn't seem to make sense.
I'm still waiting for this game😢
Why don't you just warp the voxels to a smaller scale the closer you are to the core?
How do you walk on the planets? I got the latest version and I'm only able to look at the planet but can't walk on it like you did in this video.
latest version doesnt have voxels, have to download older one
Just an idea: have alternate habitable stellar bodies. Things like a disc world, ring world, Dyson sphere, etc. Projection on a ring should be much, much easier, and scrith makes for an excellent impenetrable bedrock material. ;) Would also be a natural fit for having discrete biomes spread linearly around the ring. A Dyson sphere would have the inverse problem. A disc world has some interesting gravitational artifacts.
Maybe as a future project, but for now we will just stick to sphere worlds.
You can make a sphere with non deformed voxels, you just need a number high enough of them to approximate its shape (it looks like you have)
unless you mean voxel the size of a pixel, no you cant. Not without problems somewhere, unless you use an isosurface extraction method like dual contouring.
@@DubstepCoder You're right, later I realized about the problem with gravity... There would be no problem if they were spheres instead of cubes, but that would be a very different aesthetic.
Okay... So as the game is growing cooler and more complex everyday, I really feel like I should send some money to help it grow a lil faster. So as soon as I have some again, Ill make sure to do so. However. I also have a question about physics. The game runs well for me. I have that "too far" option turned on and everything is on high and still have nice fps (around 100 in normal situations and when there is lots of particles and such stuff..) But! My physics fps. They sux. And I dont understand why? Am I right when I say that physics is being processed by CPU or is it just gpu as well? I dont understand these things at all but I know some games wont let me use all my cpu cores. So. As I have a quad core cpu... Am I using all of em for SoA or just one or woot? Also, would it be possible to use Nvidia Cuda cores or however are they called for physics in this game? I want mooore physics. I want to spawn oceans, I WANT TO BE GOD, MUHAHAHAA! Thanks for your answer c:
Thanks for your support! You won't be able to send us any money yet, we want to be sure the engine is ready and we can actually work full time before we take any funding. As for the physics FPS, it is purely CPU, and in 0.1.6, on too far mode the CPU is doing too much work. We have optimized multithreading in the next build and are working to make the physics FPS run faster on all machines!
Ben Arnold Cool! I cant wait to play around in it more. And especially to see how the worlds of SoA are getting more and more filled with life. Hopefully everything goes well for you :). And also. Will it be later possible to see like... structures, cities / changes in terrain or anything that player changed from really far away? I mean even further then the blocks start (or end)... Basically... Will I be able to see cities I built from space or really far away? If I make em really really huge ofc. I think that is for now the only thing that seems kinda unfinished. Oh.. and the black water maybe xD. But seriously... Youre doing a great job and when its possible, I will try to support you as much as I can. Gj, keep it up :)
Tommi & Liam
Thanks! We are still trying to figure out the best way to display edits on the far terrain. The easiest way would be to just modify the heightmap with the highest voxel, but it won't look good for cities. We will figure something out! Probably a generated LOD model of buildings that gets displayed on the terrain.
Damm it no more space lift ;D
I know the game is dead but I’m not sure if I understand the method correctly. Are you transitioning to a flat voxel world that is distorted around the player? If so how does that solve the problem of having to rotate chunks?
Neat -- I just learned about this projects and it looks great! Have you figured out how you'll be storing several planets worth of voxel data yet onto the hard drive? I'd imagine that its going to be huge!
With enough cubes, small enough, from far enough away, they should all be able to sit edge to edge in a clump without needing to map to a sphere object. Is that outside the realm of realtime computation?
At that point there's no reason to use cubes, instead you would just use triangles like any normal real time planet renderer, but yes you can voxellize a sphere regardless of voxel size.
And for this kind of rendering/storage, yes it is outside the realm of possibility. A sparse voxel octree with dual contoured rendering would work better in that case.
Very nice looking, I'm entirely fine with the growing terrain problem, and in fact, I want to say something real quick, how deep are worlds going to be in this game? (I hit about, 100 Million Blocks downwards, without any game problems, no idea how. (well, problems as in big big ones, I left the other side of the planet, and lighting broke, but dam, Minecraft only goes to 64 down. So, yeah.))
You will probably be able to dig till you get past the mantle, then there will be a barrier of lava and high pressure that kills you if you try to go deeper! But that's still REALLY deep.
How did you handle saving coordinates of objects with float constraints and infinite space / galaxy ??
X,y,z coordinates become to long at some point.
Scaled coordinate spaces, the space system is on a different, scaled coordinate system compared to local space for each planet. Same thing pretty much every space sim does.
Looks good
Considering what's happened with gpus, this'll probably become a thing again.
If 64 bit generation is faster on the GPU than the CPU then planet generation is going to be very fast. My issue was that only 32 bit floats were widely supported on GPUs which isn't good enough for full scale planets.
This might be a crazy idea, and it may be too difficult to do... what about hexagonal "blocks"?
it has been done before, the blocks will shrink and have to be merged/distorted as you get deeper into the world.
Same with going higher in the air, it will distort their sizes to be larger
Gah! was worth a shot. I figures with being closer to spheroidal the distortion might be less apparent. Either way, it looks like you are taking the genre in a great direction. 👍
Ben, how long you programmed before this project? I'm a computer science student and I have always wanted to work with voxel engines and games... but seems quite impossible when you speak about those problems you had. =(
It is really hard, and it takes a very long time, but that is not a reason to not try! there are still many years ahead for this project, but it, along with a CS degree landed me a job in the game industry yesterday! make the game you want to make, and be passionate about it, and I promise you will go far.
I hope that the space stuff isnt to unrealistic, like blastoff cartoony ship into fake orbit and then warp drive. i hope it isnt that.
Rory Gordon It won't be. Immersion is key, and you can't have immersion with something like that.
Yay.
I have been watching this back and forth and I struggle to understand just how it is supposed to work at 4:16 in the video, with separate regions with transitions. Won't there still be an issue with the corners of the cube? I mean, wouldn't there be some duplicated geometry and such? Or is there some kind of "skip" at the borders so you move far into the new side of the cube?
Mikael Isaksson Each cube face is literally a separate infinite plane that extends outward indefinitely. You simply teleport to a new plane at the edge, so there is no corner issue.
Ben Arnold So, when you are standing at the corner, just before you get teleported. What terrain is rendered in the neighbouring terrain you actually don't reach because of teleporting? I get the teleporting, I don't get what gets rendered just before that point :). Is it possible to build a continous structure across planes? That will be visible? Edit: In the cube scenario a flat area wraps at the corner so it gets weird at the corner, but in your infinite plane scenario, what happens to that wrap? In my head you still would need something to fill that "empty space" with. Say you are at the north east corner. North is easy, another plane, east is easy, another plane. But north east? That one used to be a weird corner. Is that empty space now? Blurred horizon? What?
Mikael Isaksson We render the infinite plane you are currently standing on, but all infinite planes draw their voxels from the spherical world positions as if we "squished" them onto the sphere. If you are at the north side, the terrain will look very similar to the northern face, but when you cross the edge you are teleported to a new plane that is a bit different. Same thing happens at the corners. Its designed so that you can't actually cross directly over the corner, you will be forced to teleport to one of the two corner faces.
Ben Arnold Ah, then I understand. Thank you :)
What does it look like if you stand next to the corner and look at it at ground level? Can you see the point where three voxels meet instead of four? If not, where does the illusory fourth voxel come from?
Found this from a comment in there Pippen video of creating the universe in Minecraft
Wow is development still going on? this is great!
8:04 if I herd right it rego studios? Is that close to what the name you chose for the company is or did I miss hear?
Regrowth Studios
Ben Arnold very fitting name, how did you pick it?
tntiscool54
I'm pretty sure It's one of the community suggestions that we ended up really liking. It sort of spawns from the idea that Seed of Andromeda is rethinking the way voxels are used in a video game, and it also fits the theme of the game since you need to rebuild society after crash landing.
EDIT: It was suggested by Anthony Keeton AKA Damion Rayne
Is this Project still alive?
whats the name of the song in the credits at the end?
th-cam.com/video/joFWr3JzBOI/w-d-xo.html -- This video covers how cubes will be distorted if converted to cartesian coordinates, and how complex numbers can be used to create an imaginary axis that allows all blocks to maintain equal aspect ratio. The problem here is cubes still get larger the further they go from the center of the sphere.
Now that is an option, but I just don't think that cubes will cut it. I think that perhaps it is best to use triangulated voxels, you could do so much more with them while still being able to have the ability to build homes and dig. I genuinely think that is the absolute best route, because there are some extreme distortion problems with using cubes. They'd be sections of the radius, technically, and would have to possess atleast slight roundness.
did this fix the corner geometry issues?
How is the performance btw? What is this running on?
I Love Voxels! I love Worms Ultimate Mayhem!
Is this game still in development?
That was sooo interesting!
Just a weird thought, but what if the planet was a NURBS object, a procedural object that would change resolution and geometry, on the fly, according to the needs of engine. So you don't have any real issues with transition from face to face, at least as far as mapping goes. Way have fixed faces.
DocWolph We have to have a defined, static grid in order to save and load voxels to disk so that your creations persist.
Ben Arnold
As I said, it was just a thought. Okay. Nevermind.
DocWolph That would work well, but not if you want to save the voxel data and load it from the hard drive. I have seen similar uses of proceduraly generated terrain before, It actually looks really good, but becomes really slow after you change too much geometry, because instead of being able to generate the geometry on the fly it has to load it in, which also makes the world file size a lot bigger as well.
Working with Vowels can be a nightmare to be honest, a standard 1080p image is 7 megabytes, so just imagine how much more data is created when you add another dimension to that file size, it almost comes up to a few gigabytes!
Bungis Albondigas
I'm probably being too simple, but why not just procedurally generate a 2d map of the land scape. May off-line programs, like Terragen, World Machine, and Vue, do this. This would be no different that a DX11 tessellation map, except you are going with voxels and not strictly polygons.
At the start I know this would preclude caves, overhangs and the like. Anything that is not. However, it could be doing in contour map layers,but literally could be much smoother, depending on need.
Too fine a progression and you might as well be using voxels anyway, but it would follow the curvature of the world with no distortion.
Otherwise you can make set calculated assumptions, that would allow a predictable in-fill of voxels or polygons, as some engines will do. But using voxels to inform the polygons.
Voxel engines, by necessity, have to be procedural, so relying on sheer horsepower and/or RAM space means you aren't doing it right.
Contour mapping with image and displacement textures to make procedural assumptions that result in completed landscapes without distort and using very little RAM.
Then we will need to start talking about foliage, atmosphere and water.
DocWolph You could always use multiple layers for the caves and overhangs if you don't have many in the planet, assuming you are using a height map instead of the Voxels themselves. Still, It's nice to have a fully 3D world like mine craft to dig into as well.
mmm, have you looked at atomic modeling?
How does this solve the problems with the corners? Don't you still have the problem that you are able to make a 90°,90°,90° triangle on a sphere which you should be able to shrink down to a triangle just a few blocks per side. It might not be a problem with generated terrain, but once a player starts to mess about I would think the problem would get apparent.
The corner problem is solved because each plane is actually independent. We treat each plane as an infinite plane in X and Z, and just transition you to a new one once you cross a boundary
Ben Arnold But in the corners you have 3 planes meeting in a single point. On the edges you can map two half-planes to a plane, but how do you map 3 quarter-planes to a plane in a way that is consistent?
Kalmakka
We don't treat it like 3 planes meeting. We actually extend the plane you are on infinitely in all directions, we pretend there isn't even a corner, and we just transport you to a new plane once you cross the invisible edge boundary.