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@ -60,10 +60,12 @@ environments. |
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And I'm sure there are other possible benefits to using voxels/blocks. |
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Hopefully this will make it easier for people to explore the space. |
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Also, the library has a pretty wide range of features to allow |
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The library has a pretty wide range of features to allow |
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people to come up with some distinctive looks. For example, |
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the art style of Continue?9876543210. I'm terrible at art, |
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so this isn't really my thing, but I tried to put in flexible |
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the art style of Continue?9876543210 was one of the inspirations |
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for trying to make the multitexturing capabilities flexible. |
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I'm terrible at art, so this isn't really something I can |
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come up with myself, but I tried to put in flexible |
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technology that could be used multiple ways. |
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One thing I did intentionally was try to make it possible to |
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@ -81,6 +83,35 @@ else with it. E.g. in your authoring tool (or procedural |
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generation) you can make smooth ground and then cut a |
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sharp-edged hole in it for a building's basement or whatever. |
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Another thing you can do is work at a very different scale. |
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In Minecraft, a person is just under 2 blocks tall. In |
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Ace of Spades, a person is just under 3 blocks tall. Why |
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not 4 or 6? Well, partly because you just need a lot more |
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voxels; if a meter is 2 voxels in Mineraft and 4 voxels in |
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your game, and you draw the same number of voxels due to |
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hardware limits, then your game has half the view distance |
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of Minecraft. Since stb_voxel_render is designed to keep |
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the meshes small and render efficiently, you can push the |
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view distance out further than Minecraft--or use a similar |
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view distance and a higher voxel resolution. You could also |
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stop making infinite worlds and work at entirely different |
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scales; where Minecraft is 1 voxel per meter, you could |
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have 20 voxels per meter and make a small arena that's |
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50 meters wide and 5 meters tall. |
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Back when the voxel game Voxatron was announced, the weekend |
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after the trailer came out I wrote my own little GPU-accelerated |
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version of the engine and thought that was pretty cool. I've |
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been tempted many times to extract that and release it, but |
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I don't want to steal Voxatron's thunder so I've avoided |
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it. You could use this engine to do the same kind of thing, |
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although it won't be as efficient as an engine dedicated to |
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that style of thing would be. (For example, if you're building |
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the whole mesh from scratch every frame--which you should do |
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because you want to enable that worst case--you can skip |
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creating voxel faces that face away from the camera, since |
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they can never be seen.) |
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**Q:** |
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What one thing would you really like to see somebody do? |
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@ -99,7 +130,10 @@ and all of that stuff. |
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So what I'd really like to see is someone build some kind |
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of voxel-game-construction-set. Start with stb_voxel_render, |
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maybe expose all the flexibility of stb_voxel_render (so |
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people |
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people can do different things). Thrown in lua or something |
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else for scripting, make some kind of editor that feels |
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at least as good as Minecraft and Infinifactory, and see |
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where that gets you. |
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**Q:** |
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Why'd you make this library? |
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@ -130,9 +164,10 @@ About the release video... how long did that take to edit? |
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**A:** |
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About seven or eight hours. I had the first version done in |
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maybe six or sevent hours, but then I realized I'd left out |
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maybe six or seven hours, but then I realized I'd left out |
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one clip, and when I went back to add it I also gussied up |
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a couple other moments in the video. |
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a couple other moments in the video. But there was something |
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basically identical to it that was done in around six. |
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**Q:** |
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Ok, that's it. Thanks, me. |
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