[Mandrake]

I was thinking of building a Voxel Engine in C/C++ (keeping the resolution low for speed, but using something like 2xsai to smooth it out- might make for some pretty convincing software environments), mostly just as an experimental learning experience to try and make something *new* and *unique*.

The basic idea is simple- create a C/C++ voxel library based on either Allegro, SDL or clan lib. Probably using just filled_rects to display the information, and having support for OGG music and etc. Make it a sort of game dev lib, but for Voxels instead of plain 2d. Make it easy to cross platform (vanilla libs that are tested and work on all platforms, no untested add-on libs), and have extentions available for lua and python scripting interfaces.

Other plans- keeping a billboard sprite feature in for handling elements that would not require 3d representation (ie: a gui system). Also- a must would be a voxel editor and a voxel format. Of course rotation and etc would be necassary.

Oh well. My knowledge of voxels is very limited, so this will probably never take off.

Anyway, games I think this would be most interesting in would be an over-head isometric style rendering engine. Voxel's soft rendering

Of course, like Freya this would be completely open-source. But since I probably won't be doing the majority of work, the programmers should probably figure out what the license should be.
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[Mandrake]

here's an example of what I have in mind

http://membres.lycos.fr/nes3d/zeldacubed.htm
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[tcaudilllg]

Now that's almost exactly what I was thinking about when I mentioned 3D characters in a 2D world. Only thing I would change, is ellipsoids instead of voxels. The voxels look *bad*.

I have an ellipsoidal tech on the backburner. Would you be interested in that? :?

[Mandrake]

really? I like the voxels- it gives it a sort of warm retro look. :(
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[PhyrFox]

I agree with the voxels, actually. They look like the original game suddenly sprouted up into a third dimension. I love it. I'd help out, but, alas, I am currently working on OHR. Which is suffering from a very philisophical debate amonst my programming senses-- one one hand being the flexibility of code, the other being the speed of the code. *shrugs* The Zelda-Cubed thing is cool though. I would actually imagine quite a few people would enjoy that demo just the way it is if you had weapons, monsters, and, of course, the original soundtrack. Heck, I can't think of the nights we'd stay up seeing who can beat the original faster, or do some such thing... One typical challenge was the "don't gain hearts" challenge. Or the "don't improve swords" challenge. Any way... Yea, nostgalic (sp?) feelings abound here.

If by some chance OHR gets done this millenium, I'd help you out with that, making a voxel lib. It certainly could have its uses.

~= PhyrFox =~

[LeoDraco]

It would be nice to actually be able to see this demo. All I get is a silly grab-plug-in screen. With firefox unable to actually find a plug-in. It would be nice of the author to actually deign supply a link. And "dcr" doesn't really return anything intelligent on google.
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[Mandrake]

If your on Linux, Shockwave doesn't have Linux support.
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[Bjorn]

Yeah it seems to require director. I can't view it either.

[Mandrake]

Wow, some conversations over at allegro.cc ( http://www.allegro.cc/forums/view_thread.php?_id=458817 ) really opened up my mind to an entirely different way of doing voxels. originally I was planning on just doing each voxel sprite being a series of small voxels put together much in a way a bitmap is, sort of creating a 3d bitmap, and then rendering it to an isometric projection. They showed me the way that Command and Conquer does it (I think) where it's a series of bitmap slices stacked on top of each other. Even though this is a tad slower than my direct projection method, it does make actually dealing with the data easier, as well as finding collision detection (even pixel perfect).

The part that has me thinking now is exactly how to create a voxel sprite editor, heh, and then a map engine. This is starting to look like it might be a lot easier to manage than I originally thought.
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[Mandrake]

Hmm. I've decided that it doesn't really need it's own engine. I'm going to add it to Freya.
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[bay]

i was somewhat interested in this when i found out about metroid cubed, unfortunately i was never able to find a live link or archived dcr file for metroid cubed.

im glad you found one for zelda.

any more on this you have would be cool, i like the idea of this stuff... just too much other things on my plate atm to really dig in.

.02$

[bay]

[Mandrake]

I'm going to create a voxel-editing tool, for loading voxels into Freya. The next release (2.3- this weeekend) will just load and render a voxel and rotate it.

2.5 will have a voxel editor included, as well as the start of a voxel map system and some anti-aliasing.
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