Working On Infinite Voxel Terrain
This past week went pretty well here. I am busy with Nathan working on some secret stuff which will all be revealed when our IndieGoGo campaign launches on the 25th. Steve has been busy working on the Infinite Voxel Terrain and the movement. So we thought we would show some indev shots of the voxel terrain.
As you can see in the screenshots above, we have a nice noise algorithm that can create tunnels infinitely underground. It does this all proceduraly and loads in chunks as you walk around. It's really fun to explore all the different tunnels underground.
We plan to release another game update sometime next week with the first playable infinite voxel terrain. Some other improvements that will be added in the coming weeks will be multiple material support, digging, optimization, and LOD. Steve is also working on a multitude of fixes for the physics movement system, tighter control, making it so the player doesn't jerk around, a proper falling animation, and much more control over climbing.
I'm nearly done planning the IndieGoGo campaign alongside it's perks. We plan to have cool things like T-Shirts, Posters, and lots of unique in game content. It is a lot of work to make a proper campaign but we think it will be worth it! Once the main campaign is planned, I will start working on a new video.
Thanks for your support and we look forward to your feedback,
Will
Very interesting, i wonder how it works.
How infinite is the infinite terrain? How do you overcome the limitation of the standard datatypes like int32?
Sorry if thats a newbie question, I'm still learning programming.
It could be pretty much 'infinite', world could be saved in chunks like in minecraft, each chunk is 256x256x256 (three small ints are it's constant dimensions), two ints (32 of 64) will store X & Y location of each chunk. Each object will be placed inside of a chunk, it's location could be stored as a chunk id + 3 floats. Seems pretty easy, isn't it?
I could go on and write a longer comment about how to do it but it would take me a quite much more time.
But that technique only extends the terrain by X times (in this case 256 times for each int32 value). Its certainly larger, but thats not truly infinite yet.
On the other hand, a true infinite world would be boring because it has no end, so would it be possible to stitch the end and the beginning together seamlessly? What would the programmer need to look out for when doing this to a game world? I'm getting a feeling that there may be a whole new set of programming challenges involved with the seam that connects the end and the beginning.
The whole point of the wrapping world would be to simulate a complete planet.
Infinite means infinite from what i read, here;
"It does this all proceduraly and loads in chunks as you walk around" So it generates the world while you come close