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Voxel Farm is now available -- possibilities?
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| Demagoggles | Date: Friday, 07.12.2012, 10:10 | Message # 1 |
 Observer
Group: Newbies
Thailand
Messages: 6
Status: Offline
| My two favorite procedural world generation projects are this and Miguel Cepero's Voxel Farm -- http://procworld.blogspot.com
Voxel Farm is for procedurally generating very lifelike nature (actual mountains, rivers, trees, caves, etc), architecture by different cultures, including alien cultures and different levels of development, and you can manipulate all the architecture (dig holes, etc.) Miguel has recently made his VF tech available for use, and here's the main site.
http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/index.html
I did a search on this forum and didn't have any hits on this, so I thought I'd make my own thread about it in case it's news. The dream is if the two systems could work together, so Space Engine works on the big scale, and starts using Voxel Farm algorithms on the very close-up scale, or the current SE engine could just take a lot of VF algorithms outright. Or at the very least, there might be some cross-pollination of ideas, so the world generation could be improved by looking at how a lot of things were done in VF. (If it costs money to license VF tech, I'd be willing to donate for it.) I don't have any illusions that it may be very difficult to do that, even prohibitively so, but the idea was amazing enough to me to mention it anyway, even if it turns out to be a dumb idea in practice.
Voxel Farm is still early on, but the website advertises:
Quote Realtime generation
Server-side and farm-side generation
Sandbox mode (Minecraft style editing)
Rich Terrain
Biomes
Trees
Forests
Architecture
Ruins
Easy to use:
Get full source code
Keep your current workflow
Keep your current engine
It's the "keep your current engine" part that was interesting to me, which made it sound like it might be possible to exist alongside Space Engine's current engine too. Well I thought it was at least worth mentioning. In any event, I'm very impressed and happy with Space Engine however it develops, and just wanted to throw out this idea.
Edit: Actually on reflection, I think this thread would be better in the Feedback & Suggestions forum, since something like this goes a LOT deeper than what a mod can do, into the core system itself. (I actually got confused and thought I *was* posting in the "Feedback" forum, but I accidentally reverted to my old first thread here. Sorry about that!! I actually hope an admin moves it to that forum. I'd just make a new thread there, but I can't delete this thread and I don't want to cross-post since that's usually considered impolite.)
Edit: I'm also conscious from past experience about people casually asking for things that are insane, like completely changing an engine after 5 years developing on another one, or completely redoing something that tosses out years of work. I don't want to suggest anything like that. I'm happy with Space Engine sticking to advances within its means. I don't know what kind of task this ranks as. If it really would be insane, then don't mind saying so. That said, even not using it, it offers inspiration of things to think about... like instancing vegetation and tricks for certain types of geometry.
Edited by Demagoggles - Friday, 07.12.2012, 13:30 |
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| Salvo | Date: Friday, 07.12.2012, 14:21 | Message # 2 |
 Star Engineer
Group: Local Moderators
Italy
Messages: 1400
Status: Offline
| I don't know what would be the best place for this thread 
Anyway, i'm not sure he would like that people copy his generation of terrain to put it into other games, but if he relase the source code, it could be userful to make some difficult things in Space Engine 
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770 GPU: ASUS Radeon R9 270 RAM: 8 GBs
(still don't know why everyone is doing this...)
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| Demagoggles | Date: Saturday, 08.12.2012, 05:40 | Message # 3 |
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Observer
Group: Newbies
Thailand
Messages: 6
Status: Offline
| Hmm, on further research I'm not as optimistic. Sorry if I over did the enthusiasm in my original post.
Yes, it seems you do have to get a license to get sourcecode access and use it. It is an indie project, so I imagine the license is very cheap or even he might give a free license to another indie project if someone makes a good case for it.
But the deeper issue is I'm not sure how voxel tech and poly tech might work with each other. The way he said that his tech works fine with existing engines (which I understood to mean polygon based engines) makes me think it's something you might overlay, so you could have surface features with his tech, and still get the nice global features SE already has. But I don't know for sure, or if his tech scales up to the big scales of SE at all. I thought it worth looking into, anyway. I imagine it either works or it doesn't (without a complete overhaul which is too much), and there's not much else to say about it.
Aside from that, it's fun to read his blog and ideas on procedural world generation for its own sake. He has a lot of interesting ideas. I love to follow both of these projects, SE & VF, so maybe it's just my wild imagination that dreams of a marriage of some sorts haha. But I also love both of them for what they uniquely are too. On reflection, they're really doing two quite different things with their world generation.
Edited by Demagoggles - Saturday, 08.12.2012, 05:40 |
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| Salvo | Date: Saturday, 08.12.2012, 10:22 | Message # 4 |
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Star Engineer
Group: Local Moderators
Italy
Messages: 1400
Status: Offline
| There is another project similar to Procedural World/Voxel Farm, it's called Proland, it's free and open source, but i can't play it because it works only in 32x systems! 
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770 GPU: ASUS Radeon R9 270 RAM: 8 GBs
(still don't know why everyone is doing this...)
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| boyan3001 | Date: Saturday, 08.12.2012, 17:49 | Message # 5 |
 Astronaut
Group: Users
Serbia
Messages: 45
Status: Offline
| To be honest, this thing does not look like voxel engine at all. And if it really is, it doesn't take advantages of voxels.
I thnik someone alredy mentioned Atomontage engine somewhere on this forum. Google for it to see how perform real voxel engine.
Realno...
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| HallowedError | Date: Sunday, 09.12.2012, 02:33 | Message # 6 |
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Observer
Group: Newbies
United States
Messages: 3
Status: Offline
| I'm pretty sure it IS voxels but they're rendered very beautifully unlike most current voxel games that just give you a big ol' square hunk. I've followed his blog off and on and it looks very cool. If this could work in SE that would be amazing but I doubt they could be blended together without deep code restructuring.
EDIT: I'm also curious as to why you say it doesn't take advantage of voxels? His video 'Into the Sandbox' shows very cool Minecraft-style terrain editing.
Edited by HallowedError - Sunday, 09.12.2012, 02:35 |
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| boyan3001 | Date: Sunday, 09.12.2012, 15:32 | Message # 7 |
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Astronaut
Group: Users
Serbia
Messages: 45
Status: Offline
| As I said, take a look of the Atomontage engine here: http://www.youtube.com/user/AtomontageEngine/videos?flow=grid&view=0
And compare now details there with Voxel Farm. Honestly it looks like a polygon terrain, that maybe is constructed from voxel data.
Voxels are something like a pixels that are positioned in 3D space. Like a Lego blocks actualy. Voxel model do not need textures because evry voxel can carry colour or some other material data. Terrain in VF looks classicly textured.
I don't know anythign about VF engine, I only speak from what I saw in that videos.
Realno...
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| horatiob | Date: Monday, 10.12.2012, 10:55 | Message # 8 |
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Observer
Group: Users
Germany
Messages: 18
Status: Offline
| To clarify a little bit here, I've been following voxel farm (especially the blog http://procworld.blogspot.de/) for pretty much a year now and it definitely is voxel terrain. early versions looked a like atomontage.
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