Voxel Engine "Based" Projects

Recently I had a pleasant surprise to see that the Voxel Engine that I shared in this blog was able to help some guys to develop some amazing projects.

Inverto

"Inverto" is a first person shooter-puzzler with gravity manipulations. Game is ideological successor of such games as "Prey" and "Portal" with a pinch of parkour. Proceed all of the testing areas as a simple researcher with your trusty GraviGun. Prepare to explore Escher-esque spaces and solve navigational puzzles by changing gravity direction, employing body momentum and fighting nausea (only if you have weak vestibular system). "Inverto" is developed on Unity3D game engine and is planned on Windows, Mac, Linux and Web. Will be released later this summer. Current version of the game is in alpha state, and does not represent final product quality.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/gravitron
http://inverto.gravityboxstudio.net/

BitDrill

Although currently in it’s early stages, BitDrill is a game that is being developed by one man about online mining and combat. The basic idea of the game is that you and your friends get on a LAN game (currently, may add a server later) and mine. You sell off the resources gathered to obtain cash. With the cash you can then buy upgrades. With the upgrades you can mine deeper. Or you can fight your friends!

http://bitdrill.wordpress.com/

Optimizations

Other Unity forum users like RetromadeGames used the engine as well and shared some thoughts. Right now we are trying to optimize the chunk generation. I will post here if we are able to find some simple fixes to improve the engine performance. 

For now some things that you guys could try is avoid to recreate the mesh at every chunk refresh and use mesh double buffer and mesh markDynamic. But the biggest issues are:

• Recreate the mesh collider (as Tito, a user of BitDrill pointed out, it's better to use aabb collision. This will fix most of the performance issues)
• Soft Lightning. This could be and must be optimized ( this was just a proof of concept ).

Like I said before, this was just a prototype and it need a lot of work to get into a real project. So congrats for all those people who created some really nice things using the Voxel Engine. And please, let me know if someone else create something cool using this. :)

Voxel Engine Part 3 (Final)

As promised, here is the Voxel Engine Unity Project:
Unity Package (1.36mb)
Alternative download link

The webplayer demo is available in my previous post.

There is a "Read-me" file inside the package pointing out some directions for those who are trying to understand the project.

I would like to thanks Paul of the BlockStory project that wrote some very useful articles that helped me a lot to get started in the Voxel World. Some classes are heavily based on his samples.

Thanks as well to the Unity community that have this great topic about voxels and to Jeff Standen that wrote the Simplex3D Noise that I'm using.

This demo works on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Webplayer. It was tested on my Android Galaxy S2 and Apple iPad4.

The main bottleneck is the CPU while the player is creating and destroying blocks. In the code I left some hints of things that I would have done differently now, or links to articles that offers a better solution for what I did. Remember, this is just a prototype that emerged from a study. There is a lot of stuff to change if you are planning to use this in a real project.

The textures and sounds came from Minecraft ( https://minecraft.net/ ), and the pickaxe is a model that I did trying to reproduce the Minecraft pickaxe. So those assets are not my property and should not be used in any commercial way.

Fell free to use all the other assets and scripts in the way you like.
If you did something cool using this project, please let me know. :)

Thread

Voxel Engine Part 1

Voxel Engine Part 2

Voxel Engine Part 3 (Final)
Voxel Engine "Based" Projects