Voxel Quest Update 04 / 08 / 2015 news

I have made several improvements to Voxel Quest since my last post here. This update mainly goes over physics and projectiles and character movement.

Since the last update:

• Explosions (temporary effect, needs improvement); Sound effects are also all placeholders by the way
• More intelligent chunk refreshing that reduces redundant chunk refreshes (useful for destruction among other things).
• Rendering spheres of arbitrary size in screen space with real depth, normals, clipping, etc
• Projectiles
• Camera Shake (on jump, on objects hitting ground, fades with distance from camera); it is exaggerated right now
• Zooming in and out to first person mode
• Walking around with collision, realtime smooth movement that can revert to unit space for turn-based combat and so forth.
• Physics (gravity, dampening, rigid body physics with adjustable bounciness/hardness, friction, etc). Currently operates on axis-aligned boxes (even when boxes are rotated on the Z axis)
• All movement-related effects are now timer-based (rather than frame-based), although you can also force a certain time interval to prevent stutter/frame skipping.
• Jumping
• Lantern placement fixed (raised up inside of houses, no more lantern clusters for more efficient lighting)
• Volumetric textures optimized for lower voxel resolutions (larger shingles, bricks, and boards)
• Better character selection/deselection with dotted line selection effect; now distinguishes between the active entity and the target entity
• Better sprite rendering with no clipping or depth sorting errors
• Labeled all 1600+ items and entities (even though they are just placeholder objects)
• Added context sensitive options to the drop down menu based on which targets (if any) are selected
• Quick experiment with trees: upped the number of limbs to produce dramatically larger trees (as seen below)
• Improved, less naive chunk picking (for rendering) - now uses a flood fill to pick chunks, instead of a bounding cube.
• Many other small improvements I am probably forgetting to list :)

I am still working on many aspects of the AI but only a day or two per week right now - I am trying to not get stuck in any one area as there are many tasks left to cover. I think this most recent set of changes opens up a lot more modding potential (in particular, for realtime games). I think it would be pretty easy to make a platformer (like Mario N64), an artillery game (like Scorched Earth or Worms), or many other options (at least, easier than it would have been with strictly unit/turn-based movement).

I came in with the intention of doing videos weekly but as it turns out monthly makes more sense - there are some weeks where not a lot happens visually. It also saves me time. Nonetheless I advise you to follow the @voxelquest (or @gavanw) account on Twitter or my Youtube channel for smaller updates in between.

Also, I posted this a bit late for April Fool's, but it is worth reposting I think. Since I added in first person view, I obviously need the obligatory hand swinging some weapon. (In this case it is one of the weapons from Hexen):

In spite of this being a joke, I really do dig this style (as did Twitter, apparently) and I would like to perhaps have something similar ultimately.