voxel patches?

[XeonG]

Would it be possible in the future to have an alternative to just a single large infinite world.

Like another method of just setting up voxel patches defined in size either directly in the inspector with width height depth..or more visually with a cube that you can resize. Tnen you just setup that gameobject like you do as its own miniworld, maybe with its own blocks, terrain types etc.. and it saves changes to its own world path if enabled.

I'm kinda wanting to have a hybrid terrain world environment as personally feel its much easier to use other methods of making terrain and worlds in other applications.. its just the voxel element is still needed for player mining, terrain destruction or building areas(at least using voxels anyway)

Haven't really come across anything in unity assets that allows this, I'm sure not even that hard a feature for some to develop though its out of scope for me.

Also is there any plans for this project to implemented smooth terrain?

Other things.. anti aliasing? does it work or am I missing something? same with AO, doesn't seem like I'm getting anything like that around the block edges from the demo scene anyway.

[alex-irt]

Voxel patches is an interesting idea and it would certainly be possible. Patches each defined as their own world would be one way to go, that would let you save each patch individually and choose some options per patch. I've considered this before but not with patches but allowing you to build anywhere in an otherwise not voxel world but these patches are interesting too. How big were you thinking the patches should be?

There are no plans for smooth terrain, I've never tried doing it so I'm not sure what it would take but I'd like to think it would be possible to override a block type to do marching cubes style meshing.

The latest branch, alpha 2, has texture filtering and mipmapping and I think AO should be everywhere. If you don't see it please post a picture of the corner between two blocks.

[XeonG]

No specific idea on patch sizes, I think more an issue on the number of patches in a surrounding area, no idea if you will be adding unet multiplayer support, but having many voxel patches (or prefabs) in a players nearby area might be more of an issue, than just a single large voxel and chunk updates for that.

I envisioned using voxel patches for specific building plots (maybe enable or disable for destruction), underground caves or player mining areas, landscape decoration, but no single patch being bigger than the normal viewing distance of a region of chunks if the player was in the middle. Maybe even having a way for a player to initiate a voxel patch

I actually recently tried out an old version of voxeland and noticed that it supports doing multiple varying sized voxel areas as gameobjects that you can move around. Similar to what I was asking about here..with another benefit of it supporting smooth terrain. Right now though I'm still just playing around with game ideas and seeing what would be achievable and good for game. I like this project and even blocky voxels have uses like buildings and underground caves where the block shape and dark lighting matters less, just not so useful for a hybrid landscapes using static meshes/smooth terrain,where using blocky voxels for terrain features doesn't blend as nicely.

Speaking of dark lighting.. I tried to get a dark night system going and underground caves areas to be completely dark.. couldn't do it, it seems the blocks are always lit, also does alpha 2 support anti aliasing?

I'll give it another try anyway

[XeonG]

So is multiworlds working now? I see vague implementation of support for it, but in testing I found zero way of actually getting it working.

Also as far how 'voxel patches' should be implemented I recently tried out Cubiquity... which has exactly what I was looking for which is "Support for multiple volumes which can exist in transform hierarchies." . ..

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/12689
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cubiquity-a-fast-and-powerful-voxel-plugin-for-unity3d.184599/

Unfortunately doesn't support textured blocks, or chunk loading/unloading.. hell even networking which I see you are working on with unet which is great. but the implementation and examples of generating terrain for Cubiquity intrigued me and seems like the more stable engine to use right now with documentation..unfortunatly it has some negative, so I haven't dived into it much.

Anyway I would like to know if you could provide any similar example for doing the same thing with Voxelmetric...

Here are two scripts, or you can just see them in the example scenes for Cubiquity...
https://bitbucket.org/volumesoffun/cubiquity-for-unity3d/src/46520191468157aab2187ad6649342a30a20dad3/Assets/Cubiquity/Examples/CreatingVolumesFromCode/MazeFromImage/ColoredCubeMazeFromImage.cs?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default

and

https://bitbucket.org/volumesoffun/cubiquity-for-unity3d/src/46520191468157aab2187ad6649342a30a20dad3/Assets/Cubiquity/Examples/SharedAssets/Scripts/ClickToDestroy.cs?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default

I've tried Alpha3 however seems a little unstable, having the editor lock up multiple times while playing where unity just chews up cpu but is locked up.. so no way to see what the error was. Not sure when things will get a bit more stable or safer to really dive in and start building a game ontop of for myself, given some of the big changes still being made to the engine. I feel like waiting longer to see how things go, but really this is looking to be the best free option to getting things started, at least for cubed voxels.

Any reply would be good, btw that gitter chat things kinda sucks.. are new posts at the top or bottom? it doesn't even show a time/date of posted comment. A voxelmetric forum would be better, but I'll just use the github issues for my posts.

[alex-irt]

The multi-world and voxel patches support has dropped off my priority list lately. I implemented some support for multiple worlds in alpha 2 but didn't ever test it much because I'm not using it and no one I was talking to was using it. I think it's also implemented in alpha 3 but it's as unstable as the rest of alpha 3 and almost completely untested. Everywhere it is implemented it should be as simple as adding second world object though and then add chunks to it the same way as for a single world object.

I don't think that multi world and voxel patches are going to get any attention for a while though. I've quite busy lately and I should really be focusing on performance and stability in alpha 3 first.

Gitter is organized like a chat room, new stuff at the bottom and it should have a timestamp next to each message. Don't know what's up there but I like using a chat better than a forum and it lets you log in with github.