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Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

303 points by shawndumas 11y ago

AustinG08 11y ago
I discovered you on HN several years ago and have been following your progress ever since. You are an inspiration to do-it-yourselfers everywhere. Rooting for you man!
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks!
marcalc 11y ago
I love seeing these videos. For a long time I appreciate Gavan's work. I hope he succeeds in creating an RPG game engine.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks! Glad you like them. I apologize in advance that I kind of tend to drone on (both a combination of being tired (I shot this video several hours ago at around 5 am) and my already monotone voice.
  - justinpombrio 11y ago
    Don't worry: your passion comes through in your work, if not in your voice. EDIT. To give some unsolicited advice: From my experience giving presentations, if you want to give a demo that sounds good, I recommend around a dozen practice runs.
    - mynewtb 11y ago
      Or separate video and audio capture.
      - bronson 11y ago
        Both of which require spending a lot more time on it.
frik 11y ago
Wow, it's amazing how it evolved from an 2D style isometric low res voxel engine to a full 3D voxel engine.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  And probably it will come full circle. I have an isometric mode I am going to use for low end machines (iso mode can be rendered once every couple seconds, instead of 60 FPS). With the exception of animated stuff, but that is relatively cheap to compute.
andallas 11y ago
So glad I kickstarted this. Very excited about the progress. Keep on with it. One of the projects I'm okay waiting a long time for because I know it's going to be worth the wait!
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks for backing :) I hope it is!
sergiotapia 11y ago
For the uninitiated why is this exciting? The graphics look really washed out and jittery. Thanks!
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes large, so this make its easy for users to share their creations with each other (which could be just a few kilobytes in size). It is able to represent an area of several square kilometers with virtually no memory footprint (something of this detail would require several gigabytes of memory to store all the vertices for polygon data, not to mention the texture data). This entire scene can change instantly based on user parameters. I don't do a great job of demoing all of this but I should in the future. :)
  - sergiotapia 11y ago
    That sounds really interesting, so compared to traditional polygon based graphics voxel is absolutely tiny?
    - kaoD 11y ago
      Voxels are discrete, so not absolutely tiny. Voxel = vox (volume) + el (element), similar to pixel = pix (picture) + el. Do you know Minecraft? All those cubes in its world are voxels. The amazing thing here is how tiny this guy's voxels are while still keeping the game running at a decent framerate. Compared to traditional polygon graphics: voxels are discrete elements in space (sort of like "giant atoms") while polygons are the surface of objects (cuts of planes in 3d space). Being merely polygons they have no depth (as GP said, they're paper-thin) while voxels are inherently volumes in your space. You could compare it to Lego vs. papercraft.
    - 11y ago
BatFastard 11y ago
Wow, I was high sceptical that you would be able to scale this up past the short view distance. But not only have you managed to get a good view distance, but you also added in a nice animation system. Congrats to you! This is coming from someone who has spent years designing their own voxel platform. Please get this out to users to let them start building things, you will be amazed at what they can create.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks! Don't tell anyone, but I was legitimately skeptical too. :)
  - munificent 11y ago
    Many many many game developers get sucked into the infinite vortex of trying to "find the fun". A computer is a very large blank canvas and the set of all possible games is infinite. It can be overwhelming trying to decide what game to make. Often, developers wander off to "make an engine" partially as an excuse to put off making those scary decisions. But an engine isn't a game and if you want to ship something people can play (and not just make games themselves with) you do have to make that choice. You've made an insane amount of progress, but I wonder if you're struggling with this too. If I can make two suggestions that might help: 1. Realize a negative choice has positive value. Every idea or feature sounds cool, so the default answer to "Should I add ___?" or "Can the player do ___?" or "Can the engine support ___?" is going to be "yes" because it all sounds fun. But the end result is something that takes infinite time to produce. Your time is finite. It takes courage, but I find I make better progress when I deliberately allow myself to choose not to do something. Remember, any feature you omit pays you back in the most important currency: time. By saying, for example, "No multiplayer", you're saying "Yes" to a lot of other features you will now have time to implement. 2. Make the game that only your engine can do. You're in an unusual position in that you already have a very interesting, unique engine. Most developers out there just have half-baked clones of existing engines. When you're trying to figure out what kind of game to build on top of that engine, focus relentlessly on the kind of gameplay your engine, and only your engine can support. For me, that's rich, detailed, destructible terrain. If it doesn't take advantage of voxels, cut it. Looking at the videos over the past year, I see lots and lots of basic character animation. Every game engine can do that. It's not interesting to see yours can too, and it takes (took) a ton of your time to do it. Don't spend time catching up to other engines. Spend time building on top of what you already have. I don't care if a character in the game is a simple billboard—I actually think billboard characters would look nice with the pixely voxel style—I'm coming to your engine for the terrain. Everything else is secondary. Good luck! It's been inspiring watching you make progress on this.
dsugarman 11y ago
I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I am just really inspired by your work, you can see the trajectory of this project with each update. The environments look simply beautiful with the huge view distance. The big unproven thing is building something that is fun. I look at Spore as this great unbelievable game engine that accomplished exactly what it set out to do. But they forgot to make the game fun, don't be Spore.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  I agree. Funny enough I came into making this thinking the "fun" aspect of it would be the easy part. Just assemble all the pieces and suddenly it is fun, right? Concept is really key - doesn't matter how many features you have, if your core concept is no good you have no game.
ShawnCleverdon 11y ago
Looks great! Will you add anti-aliasing at some point in the future?
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Yes, even going to do upscaling most likely (low res prepass with a high res detail pass)
lechevalierd3on 11y ago
Link is dead right now, the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w
memco 11y ago
I was curiously drawn to back this even though I haven't paid for any other video game of any kind in several years. It is exciting to see how far things have come. Can't wait to try it.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  I'm flattered - can't wait to ship it :)
agentultra 11y ago
Is gavanwoolery made of magic and unicorns? This is amazing and his progress is nothing short of astounding. If he's reading this: how do you fund work like this? You said you're raising a kid, I've got two! Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing?
- lfowles 11y ago
  > Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing? Phew, I don't even have kids, and I can't maintain a couple-hours-a-night hobby between maintaining relations, dinner, and a fairly late bedtime.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thank you! I have two small-time investors currently, although I am still living relatively minimally (I also put in a good deal of money from personal savings, and ~$35k came from Kickstarter). Its pretty much a every spare second of your life type thing, especially with a baby. :)
  - agentultra 11y ago
    It looks like a lot of fun. I've been following the development for some time and really enjoy your posts and updates (especially the ray-cast renderer, so cool). You're amazing.
    - gavanwoolery 11y ago
      Thank you, it means a lot :)
  - lowglow 11y ago
    Hey, can I say I love your work! I'm also trying to get a platform off the ground to help creatives like you and me build more stuff. It's sort of a patreon for makers/inventors/developers, but instead of simple crowdfunding, I wanted to build-in all the tools I needed to grow my project and community simultaneously. I'd love if you and anyone else reading this would check it out and give me some feedback: Http://baqqer.com I'd really love to help more people fund and follow their passions full-time.
teoucsb82 11y ago
Go Schwa!
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  :)
  - teoucsb82 11y ago
    Ahh. Sweet, sweet validation. Love seeing you on here, buddy!
piptastic 11y ago
Are the game engine and game coupled together? Meaning if I purchase the Alpha game key, will that give me access to the game engine during Alpha to start looking at that side of things?
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Yes, in fact the full source is going up on github, likely right around or during release of the first alpha build.
  - sounds 11y ago
    Oh, wow! How did I miss this? If you are pushing the source on github (regardless of license, I want to avoid that rathole) just so others can learn from what you did, then where do I go to fund you?
    - gavanwoolery 11y ago
      Source will be public but I have to attach a license at least for the first couple years. If you are interested in supporting me, you can either preorder a copy or become a patron: http://www.voxelquest.com/patrons.html http://www.voxelquest.com/patrons.html :)
      - Diederich 11y ago
        Well Gavin, enjoy updating your active patrons list. This bit of love from Hacker News should do you good, in a variety of ways! Watching the demo today woke up, in me, some long forgotten excitement. My son and I enjoy the hell out of Minecraft. It's a great game and it arrived in its space at just the right time. What you're doing, though, is going to push things in a new, even more exciting direction, in ways that you can't even imagine yet.
        gavanwoolery 11y ago
        Thanks! I hope so :)
unixhero 11y ago
Will this game in the future be able to run, ported or otherwise, on the proposed Voxatron Game Console[0] by Lexaloffle[1]? [0] http://www.lexaloffle.com/games.php?page=consoles http://www.lexaloffle.com/games.php?page=consoles [1] http://www.lexaloffle.com/ http://www.lexaloffle.com/
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  I love Voxatron, but not likely - Voxatron's rendering is quite different. It is one of the few "pure" voxel engines in existence.
Dirlewanger 11y ago
Wow, it's like looking into the viewport of the future of video games.
xsmasher 11y ago
From a technical point of view it's amazing. Artistically, the voxels are too big to look impressive to anyone used to polygon graphics, and too small to give off the "pixel-art" aesthetic of Minecraft or Terarria. I want to play the game evoked by the banner at the top of the page, but not the one I see in the video.
- drakenot 11y ago
  I agree. The pixels are small enough that it falls into this sort of uncanny valley of the terrain almost looking realistic, but not really. It would be better almost to go further in either direction: either make the pixels smaller and therefore the terrain and characters look much more realistic (probably technical challenges in doing this), or make them larger so it gives off the "pixel-art" look.
  - gavanwoolery 11y ago
    Yep - many things that need to be tuned visually but I don't have the time budget for it yet :) I do agree though - it actually does look better sometimes at either much lower or much higher resolution.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  It can be more like the top banner (higher res, and isometric) if set to isometric mode. It is resolution constrained for realtime / perspective camera due to all the heavy computing done in in ray marching.
- voodoomagicman 11y ago
  Want to register some support for what I see in the video - the banner looks cool, but I'm a lot more excited about the more detailed procedurally generated terrain in the video.
- kbenson 11y ago
  There are portions that look like that[1], he's just been showing off the terrain in the last few updates. Check his videos page[2], about 2/3's the way down. 1: https://youtu.be/gW04jTU5FQw https://youtu.be/gW04jTU5FQw 2: http://www.voxelquest.com/videos.html http://www.voxelquest.com/videos.html
unfamiliar 11y ago
20 minutes of aimless muttering does not a good video presentation make. Impressive progress though.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  I am not being at all sarcastic when I say that I agree. The combination of me being tired and rushing to get out the update so that I could focus on work were a recipe for for a pretty bad video. Marketing is definitely not my strong point, and moreover I can't afford the time to do it properly. But glad you like the progress :)
deleted 11y ago
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aeturnum 11y ago
I love the Voxel Quest posts because they're demonstrating some seriously cool tech. However, they feel a lot like the Wolfire development blogs [0] - great tech demos without a cohesive vision for a game. From an engineering point of view, the end goal doesn't matter, but I would also love a 'bigger picture' roadmap of where it is and where it's going. Why would I use this engine? What do I 'get' over the competition in the current state of the engine? What should I 'get' by the end? [0] http://blog.wolfire.com/ http://blog.wolfire.com/
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  This is a really good question actually. This engine isn't really meant to compete with major engines, but moreso satisfy a little niche (and maybe that could be a big niche depending on how it gets used). I think the best way to explain it is "Shadertoy for large environments" - being able to quickly dynamically create stuff with pure code. To be honest a lot of this is still unmapped territory and I'm not even one hundred percent certain that these things are all that useful. My main goal is to empower individuals by creating a relatively inflexible engine - that sounds weird but if you have a totally flexible content pipeline you are giving users enough rope to hang themselves. I guess the proof of usefulness in limitation can be found in things like Minecraft - it appeals to a broad audience of not just people who want a game, but people who like to tinker. Minecraft, by many people's accounts, is not really a fun game, but a great sandbox. I'm not saying I can get away with making an unfun game, but I think there is some sort of value in empowering users in the guise of a game. I don't know if this makes sense, let me know if I can explain it better :)
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    I have a notion that it's possible to have a "somewhat directed sandbox" game. I'm working on a combat/survival open world game with a procedurally generated tech tree to go along with the procedurally generated world. There is a "difficulty direction" (down) and the farther you go that way, the environment becomes exponentially more difficult, while the items/powerups become exponentially more powerful. (With the environment gaining power faster than the player, of course.) This gives just enough structure for players to escape the Second Life trap. (What happens to people who have no needs/problems in a virtual world? They go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy -- to Sex.) Hopefully, this will provide the right kind of structure to let players game-balance the game themselves. (And give them enough scope to invent their way into and out of corners.)
Retr0spectrum 11y ago
This is really amazing. How on earth does it all fit in memory? If the render distance is 16km, then that's somewhere around 16000 * 16000 * 2000 = 512 billion voxels, which would take somewhere in the order of 512GB of RAM. Obviously this is not the case, so what clever tricks are being used?
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  The trick is that there is an algorithm that describes the world so nothing needs to be stored until it is modified, and even then those changes are limited to a certain view distance. On the cpu side, a much lower resolution voxel data set is used for collision, pathfinding, etc (Also local to the camera)
zksv 11y ago
why not open source the engine and develop a game around it? It'll not only gain exposure, take a lot of the optimizations off your belt, but let you focus on the long-term development of a marketable game.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  I am going to open source it :) There will be a license for the first few years at least, but the source will be public. I'd like to figure out a way to do it with no license at all.
  - sounds 11y ago
    Don't worry too much about the actual open sourcing of it. Just push to github and forget. There will basically be two responses to the source code: either tinkerers or project managers. Tinkerers will just want to poke around the code, and maybe make a youtube video. Project managers will try to "fix" issues, "suggest" new directions, and basically try to get you to do things they want. :-P
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br1b 11y ago
man watching your video makes me think of pilotwings 64, it would be a lot of fun to fly around your islands.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  :D
biot 11y ago
How well does the voxel rendering parallelize based on number of cores? Related question: how much of the rendering is handled within the GPU?
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Everything is rendered on the GPU. This is more based on ray tracing and marching than voxels alone (although voxels do represent the underlying terrain and destruction data). Ray tracing is highly parallelizable - each pixel can be computed completely independent of the others.
viraptor 11y ago
This looks amazing. I imagine this could create amazing games based on at least 2 titles: - ultima - Great customisation / open world, but that's already mentioned on the kickstarter page. - LBA - I would love for someone to create next version in this engine. Can't explain why, but it seems to match so well in my mind. Especially after LBA2 went 3d.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  LBA has been brought up many times :) And yes, I am a huge fan of Ultima
mysterydip 11y ago
Saw this in an earlier stage when you were showing off lighting/shading. Very impressive! I know the style isn't for everyone, but personally I love it. Looking forward to future progress :)
emilioolivares 11y ago
The success of Minecraft comes from the ability to create. If you can capture that magic into Voxelquest I can see this being huge. I would love a game where I could create my terrain, set-up my army (like I would my toys) and then let them fight and be able to record and share the videos of the action. Wish you the best!
jsilence 11y ago
I find the achievement and persistence of Gaven absolutely astounding. You have my utmost respect and I wish you good luck and success with the project. I always love to see the updates on progress. If there were a game to buy I'd just buy it as a hat tip to show the respect.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks! THere is a preorder page, but I will be no less honored if you just buy it when the alpha ships (which should be "soon")
  - jsilence 11y ago
    Did not know preorder was possible. Just preordered now. Keep up the good work and good luck with the business!
brodavi 11y ago
I will go against the crowd and suggest that you just keep doing what you're doing. Forget about "making it fun". Even in these rough demos, the various parameters and behaviors you land on clearly shows a natural instinct for it that you can trust. Forget about "making an actual game", what you're doing is magic and the more you do it, the better. You've got a gem here. It's already insanely valuable. Keep polishing it, and the world is yours. Keep this up, as long as you can. The "last mile" is going to be easy for you.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks! It goes against "common sense" but you might be right. Sometimes the formula for success is that there is no formula. To quote myself from a prior tweet, "Success is what happens when hard work meets a stupid idea. Every idea looks smart in hindsight, but the good ones look stupid in foresight."
thedaemon 11y ago
Thank you for making a "real" voxel engine/game. I get so tired of getting my hopes up when I see "a new voxel game", and it turns out to be polygonal based Minecraft rip off. That is not what I grew up with calling voxels. Ken Silverman's Voxel Engine and Delta Force are what I remember. It's a shame that the technology suffered for so long. Please keep up the good work and continue to innovate.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Thanks, will do :)

303 points by shawndumas 11y ago

I discovered you on HN several years ago and have been following your progress ever since. You are an inspiration to do-it-yourselfers everywhere. Rooting for you man!

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks!

marcalc 11y ago

I love seeing these videos. For a long time I appreciate Gavan's work. I hope he succeeds in creating an RPG game engine.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks! Glad you like them. I apologize in advance that I kind of tend to drone on (both a combination of being tired (I shot this video several hours ago at around 5 am) and my already monotone voice.
- justinpombrio 11y ago
  Don't worry: your passion comes through in your work, if not in your voice. EDIT. To give some unsolicited advice: From my experience giving presentations, if you want to give a demo that sounds good, I recommend around a dozen practice runs.
  - mynewtb 11y ago
    Or separate video and audio capture.
    - bronson 11y ago
      Both of which require spending a lot more time on it.

frik 11y ago

Wow, it's amazing how it evolved from an 2D style isometric low res voxel engine to a full 3D voxel engine.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
And probably it will come full circle. I have an isometric mode I am going to use for low end machines (iso mode can be rendered once every couple seconds, instead of 60 FPS). With the exception of animated stuff, but that is relatively cheap to compute.

andallas 11y ago

So glad I kickstarted this. Very excited about the progress. Keep on with it. One of the projects I'm okay waiting a long time for because I know it's going to be worth the wait!

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks for backing :) I hope it is!

sergiotapia 11y ago

For the uninitiated why is this exciting? The graphics look really washed out and jittery. Thanks!

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes large, so this make its easy for users to share their creations with each other (which could be just a few kilobytes in size). It is able to represent an area of several square kilometers with virtually no memory footprint (something of this detail would require several gigabytes of memory to store all the vertices for polygon data, not to mention the texture data). This entire scene can change instantly based on user parameters. I don't do a great job of demoing all of this but I should in the future. :)
- sergiotapia 11y ago
  That sounds really interesting, so compared to traditional polygon based graphics voxel is absolutely tiny?
  - kaoD 11y ago
    Voxels are discrete, so not absolutely tiny. Voxel = vox (volume) + el (element), similar to pixel = pix (picture) + el. Do you know Minecraft? All those cubes in its world are voxels. The amazing thing here is how tiny this guy's voxels are while still keeping the game running at a decent framerate. Compared to traditional polygon graphics: voxels are discrete elements in space (sort of like "giant atoms") while polygons are the surface of objects (cuts of planes in 3d space). Being merely polygons they have no depth (as GP said, they're paper-thin) while voxels are inherently volumes in your space. You could compare it to Lego vs. papercraft.
  - 11y ago

BatFastard 11y ago

Wow, I was high sceptical that you would be able to scale this up past the short view distance. But not only have you managed to get a good view distance, but you also added in a nice animation system. Congrats to you! This is coming from someone who has spent years designing their own voxel platform. Please get this out to users to let them start building things, you will be amazed at what they can create.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks! Don't tell anyone, but I was legitimately skeptical too. :)
- munificent 11y ago
  Many many many game developers get sucked into the infinite vortex of trying to "find the fun". A computer is a very large blank canvas and the set of all possible games is infinite. It can be overwhelming trying to decide what game to make. Often, developers wander off to "make an engine" partially as an excuse to put off making those scary decisions. But an engine isn't a game and if you want to ship something people can play (and not just make games themselves with) you do have to make that choice. You've made an insane amount of progress, but I wonder if you're struggling with this too. If I can make two suggestions that might help: 1. Realize a negative choice has positive value. Every idea or feature sounds cool, so the default answer to "Should I add ___?" or "Can the player do ___?" or "Can the engine support ___?" is going to be "yes" because it all sounds fun. But the end result is something that takes infinite time to produce. Your time is finite. It takes courage, but I find I make better progress when I deliberately allow myself to choose not to do something. Remember, any feature you omit pays you back in the most important currency: time. By saying, for example, "No multiplayer", you're saying "Yes" to a lot of other features you will now have time to implement. 2. Make the game that only your engine can do. You're in an unusual position in that you already have a very interesting, unique engine. Most developers out there just have half-baked clones of existing engines. When you're trying to figure out what kind of game to build on top of that engine, focus relentlessly on the kind of gameplay your engine, and only your engine can support. For me, that's rich, detailed, destructible terrain. If it doesn't take advantage of voxels, cut it. Looking at the videos over the past year, I see lots and lots of basic character animation. Every game engine can do that. It's not interesting to see yours can too, and it takes (took) a ton of your time to do it. Don't spend time catching up to other engines. Spend time building on top of what you already have. I don't care if a character in the game is a simple billboard—I actually think billboard characters would look nice with the pixely voxel style—I'm coming to your engine for the terrain. Everything else is secondary. Good luck! It's been inspiring watching you make progress on this.

dsugarman 11y ago

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I am just really inspired by your work, you can see the trajectory of this project with each update. The environments look simply beautiful with the huge view distance. The big unproven thing is building something that is fun. I look at Spore as this great unbelievable game engine that accomplished exactly what it set out to do. But they forgot to make the game fun, don't be Spore.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
I agree. Funny enough I came into making this thinking the "fun" aspect of it would be the easy part. Just assemble all the pieces and suddenly it is fun, right? Concept is really key - doesn't matter how many features you have, if your core concept is no good you have no game.

ShawnCleverdon 11y ago

Looks great! Will you add anti-aliasing at some point in the future?

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Yes, even going to do upscaling most likely (low res prepass with a high res detail pass)

lechevalierd3on 11y ago

Link is dead right now, the video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w

memco 11y ago

I was curiously drawn to back this even though I haven't paid for any other video game of any kind in several years. It is exciting to see how far things have come. Can't wait to try it.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
I'm flattered - can't wait to ship it :)

agentultra 11y ago

Is gavanwoolery made of magic and unicorns? This is amazing and his progress is nothing short of astounding. If he's reading this: how do you fund work like this? You said you're raising a kid, I've got two! Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing?

lfowles 11y ago
> Is this a couple-hours-a-night kind of thing? Phew, I don't even have kids, and I can't maintain a couple-hours-a-night hobby between maintaining relations, dinner, and a fairly late bedtime.
gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thank you! I have two small-time investors currently, although I am still living relatively minimally (I also put in a good deal of money from personal savings, and ~$35k came from Kickstarter). Its pretty much a every spare second of your life type thing, especially with a baby. :)
- agentultra 11y ago
  It looks like a lot of fun. I've been following the development for some time and really enjoy your posts and updates (especially the ray-cast renderer, so cool). You're amazing.
  - gavanwoolery 11y ago
    Thank you, it means a lot :)
- lowglow 11y ago
  Hey, can I say I love your work! I'm also trying to get a platform off the ground to help creatives like you and me build more stuff. It's sort of a patreon for makers/inventors/developers, but instead of simple crowdfunding, I wanted to build-in all the tools I needed to grow my project and community simultaneously. I'd love if you and anyone else reading this would check it out and give me some feedback: Http://baqqer.com I'd really love to help more people fund and follow their passions full-time.

teoucsb82 11y ago

Go Schwa!

gavanwoolery 11y ago
:)
- teoucsb82 11y ago
  Ahh. Sweet, sweet validation. Love seeing you on here, buddy!

piptastic 11y ago

Are the game engine and game coupled together? Meaning if I purchase the Alpha game key, will that give me access to the game engine during Alpha to start looking at that side of things?

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Yes, in fact the full source is going up on github, likely right around or during release of the first alpha build.
- sounds 11y ago
  Oh, wow! How did I miss this? If you are pushing the source on github (regardless of license, I want to avoid that rathole) just so others can learn from what you did, then where do I go to fund you?
  - gavanwoolery 11y ago
    Source will be public but I have to attach a license at least for the first couple years. If you are interested in supporting me, you can either preorder a copy or become a patron: http://www.voxelquest.com/patrons.html http://www.voxelquest.com/patrons.html :)
    - Diederich 11y ago
      Well Gavin, enjoy updating your active patrons list. This bit of love from Hacker News should do you good, in a variety of ways! Watching the demo today woke up, in me, some long forgotten excitement. My son and I enjoy the hell out of Minecraft. It's a great game and it arrived in its space at just the right time. What you're doing, though, is going to push things in a new, even more exciting direction, in ways that you can't even imagine yet.
      - gavanwoolery 11y ago
        Thanks! I hope so :)

unixhero 11y ago

Will this game in the future be able to run, ported or otherwise, on the proposed Voxatron Game Console[0] by Lexaloffle[1]? [0] http://www.lexaloffle.com/games.php?page=consoles http://www.lexaloffle.com/games.php?page=consoles [1] http://www.lexaloffle.com/ http://www.lexaloffle.com/

gavanwoolery 11y ago
I love Voxatron, but not likely - Voxatron's rendering is quite different. It is one of the few "pure" voxel engines in existence.

Dirlewanger 11y ago

Wow, it's like looking into the viewport of the future of video games.

xsmasher 11y ago

From a technical point of view it's amazing. Artistically, the voxels are too big to look impressive to anyone used to polygon graphics, and too small to give off the "pixel-art" aesthetic of Minecraft or Terarria. I want to play the game evoked by the banner at the top of the page, but not the one I see in the video.

drakenot 11y ago
I agree. The pixels are small enough that it falls into this sort of uncanny valley of the terrain almost looking realistic, but not really. It would be better almost to go further in either direction: either make the pixels smaller and therefore the terrain and characters look much more realistic (probably technical challenges in doing this), or make them larger so it gives off the "pixel-art" look.
- gavanwoolery 11y ago
  Yep - many things that need to be tuned visually but I don't have the time budget for it yet :) I do agree though - it actually does look better sometimes at either much lower or much higher resolution.
gavanwoolery 11y ago
It can be more like the top banner (higher res, and isometric) if set to isometric mode. It is resolution constrained for realtime / perspective camera due to all the heavy computing done in in ray marching.
voodoomagicman 11y ago
Want to register some support for what I see in the video - the banner looks cool, but I'm a lot more excited about the more detailed procedurally generated terrain in the video.
kbenson 11y ago
There are portions that look like that[1], he's just been showing off the terrain in the last few updates. Check his videos page[2], about 2/3's the way down. 1: https://youtu.be/gW04jTU5FQw https://youtu.be/gW04jTU5FQw 2: http://www.voxelquest.com/videos.html http://www.voxelquest.com/videos.html

unfamiliar 11y ago

20 minutes of aimless muttering does not a good video presentation make. Impressive progress though.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
I am not being at all sarcastic when I say that I agree. The combination of me being tired and rushing to get out the update so that I could focus on work were a recipe for for a pretty bad video. Marketing is definitely not my strong point, and moreover I can't afford the time to do it properly. But glad you like the progress :)

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aeturnum 11y ago

I love the Voxel Quest posts because they're demonstrating some seriously cool tech. However, they feel a lot like the Wolfire development blogs [0] - great tech demos without a cohesive vision for a game. From an engineering point of view, the end goal doesn't matter, but I would also love a 'bigger picture' roadmap of where it is and where it's going. Why would I use this engine? What do I 'get' over the competition in the current state of the engine? What should I 'get' by the end? [0] http://blog.wolfire.com/ http://blog.wolfire.com/

gavanwoolery 11y ago
This is a really good question actually. This engine isn't really meant to compete with major engines, but moreso satisfy a little niche (and maybe that could be a big niche depending on how it gets used). I think the best way to explain it is "Shadertoy for large environments" - being able to quickly dynamically create stuff with pure code. To be honest a lot of this is still unmapped territory and I'm not even one hundred percent certain that these things are all that useful. My main goal is to empower individuals by creating a relatively inflexible engine - that sounds weird but if you have a totally flexible content pipeline you are giving users enough rope to hang themselves. I guess the proof of usefulness in limitation can be found in things like Minecraft - it appeals to a broad audience of not just people who want a game, but people who like to tinker. Minecraft, by many people's accounts, is not really a fun game, but a great sandbox. I'm not saying I can get away with making an unfun game, but I think there is some sort of value in empowering users in the guise of a game. I don't know if this makes sense, let me know if I can explain it better :)
- stcredzero 11y ago
  I have a notion that it's possible to have a "somewhat directed sandbox" game. I'm working on a combat/survival open world game with a procedurally generated tech tree to go along with the procedurally generated world. There is a "difficulty direction" (down) and the farther you go that way, the environment becomes exponentially more difficult, while the items/powerups become exponentially more powerful. (With the environment gaining power faster than the player, of course.) This gives just enough structure for players to escape the Second Life trap. (What happens to people who have no needs/problems in a virtual world? They go right up the Maslow Need Hierarchy -- to Sex.) Hopefully, this will provide the right kind of structure to let players game-balance the game themselves. (And give them enough scope to invent their way into and out of corners.)

Retr0spectrum 11y ago

This is really amazing. How on earth does it all fit in memory? If the render distance is 16km, then that's somewhere around 16000 * 16000 * 2000 = 512 billion voxels, which would take somewhere in the order of 512GB of RAM. Obviously this is not the case, so what clever tricks are being used?

gavanwoolery 11y ago
The trick is that there is an algorithm that describes the world so nothing needs to be stored until it is modified, and even then those changes are limited to a certain view distance. On the cpu side, a much lower resolution voxel data set is used for collision, pathfinding, etc (Also local to the camera)

zksv 11y ago

why not open source the engine and develop a game around it? It'll not only gain exposure, take a lot of the optimizations off your belt, but let you focus on the long-term development of a marketable game.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
I am going to open source it :) There will be a license for the first few years at least, but the source will be public. I'd like to figure out a way to do it with no license at all.
- sounds 11y ago
  Don't worry too much about the actual open sourcing of it. Just push to github and forget. There will basically be two responses to the source code: either tinkerers or project managers. Tinkerers will just want to poke around the code, and maybe make a youtube video. Project managers will try to "fix" issues, "suggest" new directions, and basically try to get you to do things they want. :-P

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br1b 11y ago

man watching your video makes me think of pilotwings 64, it would be a lot of fun to fly around your islands.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
:D

biot 11y ago

How well does the voxel rendering parallelize based on number of cores? Related question: how much of the rendering is handled within the GPU?

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Everything is rendered on the GPU. This is more based on ray tracing and marching than voxels alone (although voxels do represent the underlying terrain and destruction data). Ray tracing is highly parallelizable - each pixel can be computed completely independent of the others.

viraptor 11y ago

This looks amazing. I imagine this could create amazing games based on at least 2 titles: - ultima - Great customisation / open world, but that's already mentioned on the kickstarter page. - LBA - I would love for someone to create next version in this engine. Can't explain why, but it seems to match so well in my mind. Especially after LBA2 went 3d.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
LBA has been brought up many times :) And yes, I am a huge fan of Ultima

mysterydip 11y ago

Saw this in an earlier stage when you were showing off lighting/shading. Very impressive! I know the style isn't for everyone, but personally I love it. Looking forward to future progress :)

emilioolivares 11y ago

The success of Minecraft comes from the ability to create. If you can capture that magic into Voxelquest I can see this being huge. I would love a game where I could create my terrain, set-up my army (like I would my toys) and then let them fight and be able to record and share the videos of the action. Wish you the best!

jsilence 11y ago

I find the achievement and persistence of Gaven absolutely astounding. You have my utmost respect and I wish you good luck and success with the project. I always love to see the updates on progress. If there were a game to buy I'd just buy it as a hat tip to show the respect.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks! THere is a preorder page, but I will be no less honored if you just buy it when the alpha ships (which should be "soon")
- jsilence 11y ago
  Did not know preorder was possible. Just preordered now. Keep up the good work and good luck with the business!

brodavi 11y ago

I will go against the crowd and suggest that you just keep doing what you're doing. Forget about "making it fun". Even in these rough demos, the various parameters and behaviors you land on clearly shows a natural instinct for it that you can trust. Forget about "making an actual game", what you're doing is magic and the more you do it, the better. You've got a gem here. It's already insanely valuable. Keep polishing it, and the world is yours. Keep this up, as long as you can. The "last mile" is going to be easy for you.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks! It goes against "common sense" but you might be right. Sometimes the formula for success is that there is no formula. To quote myself from a prior tweet, "Success is what happens when hard work meets a stupid idea. Every idea looks smart in hindsight, but the good ones look stupid in foresight."

thedaemon 11y ago

Thank you for making a "real" voxel engine/game. I get so tired of getting my hopes up when I see "a new voxel game", and it turns out to be polygonal based Minecraft rip off. That is not what I grew up with calling voxels. Ken Silverman's Voxel Engine and Delta Force are what I remember. It's a shame that the technology suffered for so long. Please keep up the good work and continue to innovate.

gavanwoolery 11y ago
Thanks, will do :)

Voxel Quest January 2016 Update﻿

Voxel Quest January 2016 Update﻿

Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

Voxel Quest January 2016 Update