
Voxel Quest January 2016 Update﻿ - shawndumas
http://www.voxelquest.com/news/voxel-quest-january-2016-update
======
BatFastard
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.

~~~
anonova
NovaLogic's Delta Force (1998) and Delta Force 2 (1999) had a "voxel game
engine [that allowed for a] nearly unlimited draw distance" [1]. Though the
other objects in the game were rendered with polygons, has a far view distance
been difficult with modern voxel engines?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_2#Game_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Force_2#Game_engine)

~~~
gavanwoolery
Delta Force and Commanche were among games that drew me to alternative
engines. Doing a CPU-based renderer gives you lots of new tricks and
abilities, things you can't do with simplified massively parallel architecture
like GPUs. Many games have a far view distance now (see Uncharted or Just
Cause) - but doing it in a dynamic world that is procedurally generated in
realtime with solid geometry is a whole other bag of cats. :)

~~~
kazinator
Hear ye! I lost interest in games right around time time 3D graphics cards
started coming out. I figured, that scene is pats its prime now; it's going to
just be generations of the same thing over again, but rendered slightly
better. Programmers no longer in control over the details, just pushing some
triangle meshes into some hardware blackbox.

All software Doom, Quake, Wolf 3D, Rise of The Triad and such: that was still
cool stuff.

The game programmer should control every pixel going into the frame buffer.

~~~
anon4
That used to be true, but right now you not only can, but have to control
every pixel. The fixed pipeline is dead, now you have to write your own
shaders and those can do literally anything. Or use CUDA/OpenCL for even more
power.

~~~
gavanwoolery
Shaders still have plenty of limitations relative to a CPU (you can do
virtually anything with them, but some tasks are too expensive to do
efficiently). In particular, taking advantage of temporal and spacial
coherence is much more tricky on a GPU - on a CPU the early 3D renderers could
effectively use this stuff with scanline and fill tricks.

------
aeturnum
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
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
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.)

~~~
gavanwoolery
Interesting. Welp, looks like I'm going to have to resort to adding sex to the
game. :) But seriously, the idea of a "direction" for difficulty had only
vaguely occurred in my mind (for whatever reason, I am drawn to games where
you ascend or descend to progress, most notably Spelunky).

~~~
skybrian
I'd be interested in seeing a voxel game involving defensive architecture
(preparing for disasters). When I started playing Minecraft, I was interested
in making buildings, lighted streets, etc that would make it easier to survive
at night.

It turned out to be somewhat pointless because once you know how, you can
easily skip the night phase altogether. A game where you can't do that might
be interesting.

Also: preparing for floods. What happens when the river overflows or the storm
surge hits?

~~~
gavanwoolery
Yep, a survival type game would be well suited to the engine. It is definitely
part of the long term plans. In the long run I would like to have a world with
some simple towns and people can move about and raid towns and so forth and
quests kind of emerge from those circumstances. Maybe a bit like Mount and
Blade, but in a more seamless world.

~~~
skybrian
There are lots of fighting games and I don't think that's what makes voxel
games unique. The cool thing about voxels is the environment. A player-vs-
environment game puts the environment front and center, instead of making it
the backdrop.

Another idea: build a sand castle and see how long you can hold out against
the rising tide. No bad guys involved, just waves. Almost a literal sandbox
game.

------
agentultra
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?

~~~
gavanwoolery
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. :)

~~~
lowglow
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.

~~~
gavanwoolery
Cool, I love tools like this. Just curious, how do you plan to differentiate
yourself from Patreon and Kickstarter? (it is ok if you are just doing their
stuff better, there is room for competition)

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AustinG08
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
Thanks!

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xsmasher
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
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
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.

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dsugarman
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
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.

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brodavi
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
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."

------
piptastic
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
Yes, in fact the full source is going up on github, likely right around or
during release of the first alpha build.

~~~
sounds
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
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
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
Thanks! I hope so :)

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

~~~
gavanwoolery
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
That sounds really interesting, so compared to traditional polygon based
graphics voxel is absolutely tiny?

~~~
gavanwoolery
Depends on how you are representing stuff. The name is a slight misnomer that
hails to the early days of this project when everything was strictly voxel
based. Now the only thing voxels are used for is to determine the basic
terrain addition and destruction. Voxels tend to be more storage efficient
because their location is inherent to their index and vice versa.

~~~
lfowles
> Now the only thing voxels are used for is to determine the basic terrain
> addition and destruction.

Do you find that to be pretty efficient compared to other methods of terrain
deformation (ROAM,etc)? Pretty curious, since I did my big undergrad research
paper on deformable terrain in videogames before the huge voxel craze.

~~~
gavanwoolery
Depends on what you classify as efficient: mem usage, gpu workload, etc.
Voxels are easy to work with but often represent more data than your really
need.

~~~
lfowles
I was mainly asking in general terms of "gamedev" efficient: Whatever deforms
and renders at a playable rate and looks just as good as the alternatives.

~~~
gavanwoolery
Voxels would probably be the simplest thing to program with (they were easier
to use in my first iteration than my current (3rd) iteration of the engine)

------
Retr0spectrum
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
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)

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marcalc
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
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
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
Or separate video and audio capture.

~~~
bronson
Both of which require spending a lot more time on it.

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

~~~
gavanwoolery
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
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
Thanks for backing :) I hope it is!

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memco
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
I'm flattered - can't wait to ship it :)

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lechevalierd3on
Link is dead right now, the video is here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GPIvXFL0w)

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thedaemon
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
Thanks, will do :)

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

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

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viraptor
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
LBA has been brought up many times :) And yes, I am a huge fan of Ultima

------
emilioolivares
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
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
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
Did not know preorder was possible. Just preordered now. Keep up the good work
and good luck with the business!

------
zksv
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
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
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

------
mysterydip
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 :)

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

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

------
biot
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
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.

------
br1b
man watching your video makes me think of pilotwings 64, it would be a lot of
fun to fly around your islands.

~~~
gavanwoolery
:D

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teoucsb82
Go Schwa!

~~~
gavanwoolery
:)

~~~
teoucsb82
Ahh. Sweet, sweet validation. Love seeing you on here, buddy!

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

~~~
gavanwoolery
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 :)

