Show HN: My Isometric GPU-Powered Voxel Engine

http://www.voxelquest.com/1/post/2013/09/first-real-preview.html

by gavanwoolery • 13 years ago

203 76 13 years ago

josephagoss2• 13 years ago

I have an idea, could you load a basic map into this, the map would contain a rough idea what the roads, trees, buildings look like. But then use algorithms to add generated details to those objects. So it would be a way to define the rough idea what a map would be like, except all the nitty gritty is generated.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Yeah, you will actually be able to do something like that fairly "easily" (at least, relative to how complex it might be in other engines) -- the engine is scriptable via a javascript client (demoed in another post), so you could pull data from Google Maps or something.

chrisfarms• 13 years ago

Yeah would make a pretty cool openstreetmap tile generator

josephagoss2• 13 years ago

Sounds really cool! :)

TuringTest• 13 years ago

Forget maps, this would be the ultimate Dwarf Fortress visualization engine!

simcop2387• 13 years ago

I'm actually working on something like that, where instead of using a map, I'm making a small DSL that's a bit prolog like for creating the rules about how things should be placed. It will be open sourced but I do have to write it first.

I'm basing a lot of my work on things like this: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

samsaga2• 13 years ago

It seems that he is using marching cubes [http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01.html]

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Nope - good guess though. :) Funny story about marching cubes: in 2004, when I was creating my first major game engine, I "invented" the marching cubes algorithm without knowing that it already existed (and at that time, was patented) - a testament to how stubborn I am about learning on my own.

I am actually using ray-cast volumes, rendered to a hexagon (6 tris). Each vertex in the hexagon contains two points, a front and back location of the equivalent cube. (If you look a a cube in isometric perspective, it looks just like a hexagon which is why I used this technique -- another thing I'm sure that has been done before me). :) Another optimization over a standard cube is that a cube contains 12 triangles, and would have double redundancy on fill time.

sspiff• 13 years ago

and at that time, was patented

Is it no longer patented today? Who held the patent and was it released or did it just expire?

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

@sspiff (can't reply because it is nested too deep I guess?) -- I think it expired in 2005 or 2006 if I remember correctly.

willvarfar2• 13 years ago

But can we have a more in-depth post about how you do do it? Are you tessellating on the CPU? When you say "on the GPU", do you mean you have a geometry shader? What platform are you using? I mean, I'm hoping for a lovely technical blog post with a few illustrations ;)

Excellent work, keep it up! Gorgeous :)

ZoFreX2• 13 years ago

The Feynman approach. Nice :)

aerique• 13 years ago

I actually went through the same thing! I was also working on a voxel engine a good few years ago and when going through all the ways of turning voxels into meshes I invented my own version of marching cubes as well.

When I finally found the right search terms to Google on the issues I ran into I came across the real marching cubes algorithm and was actually happy I figured out most of it on my own. A good boost for my self-confidence. The fact that the patent just had ran out was nice as well.

If you scroll to the end of this page you can see some screenshots: http://github.com/aerique/okra

nobodysfool• 13 years ago

I have a funny story also. I "invented" mmx, and markov chains. Well, MMX didn't exist when I envisioned it, it came 10 years later. Markov chains, I have no idea how long they've been around, but I'd had the idea about 6 years ago. If only once I can generate a new idea, I'd be happy.

pyalot2• 13 years ago

Quite likely.

JMiao• 13 years ago

I'm sorry you couldn't live in your parents' house forever. :)

I remember reading about the Genesis Engine in college. For what it's worth, I think it's awesome how you've worked your way to Voxel Quest. Good luck.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Thanks! I am amazed that people still remember it. It has been a decade long battle to fight my way back into doing game development full time, and even though I am working like a dog I couldn't be happier right now.

moconnor• 13 years ago

Genesis3D? I contributed a little to that back in '98! There were big plans at the time, though they didn't come to anything of course. I remember working on the collision code late at night.

Those were the days :-)

mr_luc• 13 years ago

Oh wow, let me add to the group and say thanks. Teenaged mr_luc turned into a programmer mostly because of late-90's game engines, and I'm probably not alone. Everyone who wanted to be a programmer and was interested in game development probably remembers Genesis3d.

There's something magical, as a young programmer, about compiling an open-source 3d engine and walking around in the demo.

Although in my case I never did more than compile Genesis and tweak a few variables in the physics code before recompiling. (I ended up learning from the Torque Game Engine and its forebears, because they had a scripting language and sprawling outdoor terrains with multiplayer).

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

Please change the seizure-inducing flickering background, thanks.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

noted :)

lutusp• 13 years ago

There was once a Japanese cartoon show that was said to have actually induced seizures among susceptible viewers:

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9712/17/video.seizures.update/

So it's not mere hyperbole to say "seizure-inducing."

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

And more recently the unveiling of the 2012 Summer Olympics logo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6724245.stm

pjgomez• 13 years ago

Great work, kudos!

kunil• 13 years ago

I was expecting another minecraft clone but it looks awesome.

forgottenpaswrd• 13 years ago

You made an amazing job here.

It would be great if you find a way to sustain your development using this system.

chii2• 13 years ago

Is there any way for a hobbyist game dev to try out the engine in a game? say, for the next ludum dare or some such competition.

I think real feed back comes from people using it, and can't be given by only viewing screenshots or video demos. I m assuming you are going to license the engine out of course.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Hi - I am going to avoid releases until I am in beta. The reasons being: I don't want to preemptively disappoint people with bugs/issues, and as a one man team I simply can't keep up with the support work (its hard enough doing a public release and trying to respond to many comments/emails). I would like to open source the engine in the future if it is possible (the decision is not entirely up to me).

Yoms• 13 years ago

Great work, wonderful to see voxel engines becoming more popular and feasible. Also check out http://procworld.blogspot.ca/ great technical write-ups on the engine chosen by Sony for EQ2.

donpdonp2• 13 years ago

Everquest II was released in 2004, I believe you mean Everquest Next. The voxel engine in the game looks very exciting. Modifying individual blocks after they're placed blew my mind.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Yes - I have been following Miguel's work for some time (and apparently he checks out my work sometimes too) :)

Ellipsis753• 13 years ago

Looks good but the images on the page are actually larger images scaled down with css. This is a bit pointless as the images always show the same size regardless of how large my resolution is (They're shown in a small column in the middle anyway). This is just a pet peeve of mine as I dislike seeing the images loading slowly and knowing there's no real reason for them to do so. Also Firefox has a tendency to resize is a really ugly way when width/height is set on an image. Finally it's going to eat through all your bandwidth as you're featured on Hacker News. :P (You might even want to consider replacing them with small jpegs if you're worried about your bandwidth but this would be lower quality.)

Congratulations and the engine really does look great. :)

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Thanks! My host is Weebly (I believe a YCominator graduate, IIRC). I am not a huge fan of their image gallery either. :(

tgb• 13 years ago

Does having a fixed isometric perspective give any benefits to performance or code quality?

corysama• 13 years ago

My guess: Because there is no perspective or camera rotation, changes in the appearance of the voxels are limited to screen-aligned translation, zooming and changes in lighting. Relighting is easy assuming he's using standard deferred rendering techniques. Zooming can be clamped to a certain range. If the voxels are rendered off-screen at maximum zoom, that just leaves panning the render around on the screen. In other words, he can render each tile once and cache them as 2D images to reuse in later frames. Each frame he only needs to render new tiles that have not been seen before. Unless you are panning really fast, that's a small amount of work compared to re-rendering the whole screen every frame like most 3D engines do.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

That's pretty much exactly whats going on. It renders it to a frame and then uses deferred rendering for the lighting. Static objects (i.e. terrain) are not re-rendered until the camera moves, but dynamic objects (like the grass) are rendered in realtime (unless the grass animation is turned off, which I have included for weaker machines).

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Yes! With a dynamic (traditional) perspective, you must obviously render every time the camera moves. Since the camera never changes angle, I can render once and be done with it until something is changed or the memory pool cycles back to the start (i.e. a chunk falls out of rendering distance).

In terms of code quality, it is actually far more difficult (IMO) to do isometric projection with a 0.5 slope (not true isometric with 120 degrees between axes). You can build a projection matrix to handle it but I actually just worked out the math by hand to handle the projections and inverse projections. So, for a while this really put a dent in how clean my code was until I refactored everything several times.

aktau• 13 years ago

This is really awesome, considering my current (first ever) graphics engine which just uses standard polygon rasterization can't even render a few rotating cubes without starting to break a sweat. And you've got billions of everything! You say the grass is green-space. Do you mean that you just generate the grass as a texture and blit it to a framebuffer or something equivalent? (i.e.: it's never "real" geometry on the GPU).

Do you generate your visuals by rendering a fullscreen quad and having shaders do all the work is there actual polygon work involved?

Just curious, nice work!

EDIT: drat, it seems I missed a few comments, you already answered most of my questions. So feel free to disregard them. I'm leaving the comment to show that I really like the things you've done with the engine, it looks fantastic (and $deity knows how much fun it can be to work on something like that)

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Thanks! Everyone has to start somewhere (if you saw my earliest work, you'd probably laugh). :) Good polygon rasterization can be a project in itself.

j_m_b• 13 years ago

Mmmmmmmm.... Voxely!

kingmanaz3• 13 years ago

I haven't touched video games in years, but I did spend time playing Delta Force in the 90s. Voxels were a perfect fit for the 300+ meter military engagements DF1 was attempting to model. I tried one of the latter entries in the series after they "upgraded" to a standard 3D engine and the sense of space was lost.

I can recall when Ultima 9 was originally conceived it was anticipated to be isometric 3D RPG. Here is a screenshot http://i.imgur.com/MGDSXYP.jp . Voxels would seem to be a great fit for such an engine.

donpdonp2• 13 years ago

fixed url http://i.imgur.com/MGDSXYP.jpg

using game data from older games sounds like a great idea (if any of those licenses allowed it)

kingmanaz3• 13 years ago

The exult project (http://exult.sourceforge.net/) has done much of the hard work in terms of making game data available. It would be neat to see a voxel engine transplanted into the old game.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

I remember as a teenager I had the first issue of PC Gamer that talked about Ultima 9 and Ultima Online - I must have read it 1000 times. It was a shame U9 never lived up to its plans (I blame EA! :), hopefully Garriott has better luck with his current venture.

kingmanaz3• 13 years ago

Same here. I was hoping Origin would redeem itself after U8.

Hopefully in the afterlife I'll be able to play U7 again for the first time. What a great game and a hard act to follow.

shadowmint2• 13 years ago

This is a cool project, but something here sounds familiar a) doesn't use a known algorithm like sparse tress or b) a million GB of memory.

...wait a second. I swear I've heard this before.

Why does everyone who works with voxels act so secretive about how their rendering works?

No one cares.

No one. Cares.

Really. No one is going to steal your clever memory optimizations. They don't care.

If you've done something clever, explain it. Maybe you'll get a hi-5 from someone. Being all, coy about it is just irritating.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Hi - I kind of have explained it a little bit in previous comments here - I was going to go more in depth on my website but last night I was running on very little sleep. Sorry! :) The tricks are actually not that interesting but I guarantee I'm not like the Infinite Detail / Euclideon guys. :) It generates the voxels in GPU memory (About 128 MB of memory is used per chunk) - but once it renders the chunk it immediately dumps the non-critical data and reuses that rendering page. It can still access any visible voxel in the 2D rendering (even the various chunk layers), but to access the internal voxels it has to regenerate the chunk or use the procedural generation algorithm to determine what a given point would be like. Collision detection can still be handled pretty well via the larger chunk properties and the depth properties of the rendered chunk. So the real trick lies in procedural generation and the ability to rapidly recreate chunks as needed. It uses ray-casting on a hexagon shaped like an isometric cube, which is nothing very advanced or new. Let me know if I can answer in more detail - I may do a writeup on the techniques time willing. :)

shadowmint2• 13 years ago

Sounds interesting, definitely be interested in a blog post with some details, for example, how it compares to the normal way of doing this sort of stuff (eg. http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pcozzi/OpenGLInsights/OpenGLInsig...)

GuiA2• 13 years ago

Thanks for posting this. I've had a few toes (ok maybe a foot) in the indie game development world for quite a few years now, and they're definitely amongst the group of developers who are the most averse to putting their shit on github and open sourcing their libraries etc.

The game dev community has a love/hate relationship with open source: on one hand a lot of widely used tools are under open source/free software licenses (box2d, SDL, etc.), but on the other hand you'd be hard pressed to find an indie willing to release his source code (Jason Rohrer I love you).

There's definitely a technical reason for it (game code is often hacky and not that reusable), but I've observed that it has to do more with the sense of pride of the developers ("my code is too ugly people are going to think I am a bad developer").

brymaster2• 13 years ago

definitely amongst the group of developers who are the most averse to putting their shit on github and open sourcing their libraries etc

Yep. I'm sure the majority of them are also GPL violators.

They love to take but never give back.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Yeah I would like to eventually open source my code (at the very least, the javascript portion which is used to mod/script/edit the engine will DEFINITELY be open source). Not all decisions are mine to make (I have to generate a monetary return as I have a small investment, then we will see how things go from there). :)

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

There's definitely a technical reason for it (game code is often hacky and not that reusable), but I've observed that it has to do more with the sense of pride of the developers ("my code is too ugly people are going to think I am a bad developer").

Or maybe that they just don't want to compete with people building on --or even outright cloning-- their products. Of course, they're perfectly happy building on others' work.

Impossible• 13 years ago

This isn't entirely true. There are indie games that are open source or have publicly available easily accessible source code.

LD48 requires that you open source games in the jam, so that's 1000s of games with available source code, even if most of them don't live on Github. Quite a few Humble Bundle games are open source as a result of the bundle (http://indiegamebundle.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Humble_Bundle_...) I can think of other indie games that are open source, Stephen Lavelle's games (http://www.increpare.com/), Game Maker Spelunky, Mari0, Infinite Super Mario Bros. Roguelikes are also usually open source.

Libraries or contributions to frameworks that have come from indie game developers include MojoShader (http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&dat...), MonoGame for Mac OS X, Linux and NaCL, (http://supergiantgames.com/index.php/2012/08/bastions-open-s...), Flashpunk and Flixel.

I also think it's unfair to knock game developers for not open sourcing their games. Last time I checked, many startups open source libraries and helper code, but very few of them open source their product code. The indie game community is also much smaller than the startup community and also less technical on average.

nollidge• 13 years ago

Can you increase the contrast of the font? I can barely read gray-on-slightly-darker-gray, particularly at that size.

gavanwoolery20• 13 years ago

Good suggestion, I'll do that (its a prefab theme). I have noticed that issue myself.

Show HN: My Isometric GPU-Powered Voxel Engine

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