Hi All - I’d like to introduce my new Voxelform scripting package, now available on the Unity Asset Store, and provide a public forum for questions and answers.
Voxelform 2.0 was released Dec 21, 2011
For more information and playable demos, check out the website: http://voxelform.com
Features:
- Designed to be a flexible, customizable, part of your project.
- New: Includes two demo scenes: A simple run-time editor demo, and a simple FPS controller game demo.
- Heavily documented source with XML code docs for tool tip support.
- Marching Cubes algorithm at the core, provides efficient dynamic organic terrain.
- Sculpt the terrain on the fly, any way you see fit.
- Easy access to voxel data, and easily scripted externally.
- New: Voxel data source is fully customizable via an interface.
- New: Voxel structure with “factory settings” includes support for volume, material index, and neighbor info.
- New: Use voxel type information for multi-material support with material palettes.
- New: Material palettes (for use with voxel terrain) support a theoretical maximum of 65,536 Unity Materials.
- New: Hidden regions within multi-material welds are culled before Marching Cubes processes them.
- Chunk based design.
- Flexible voxel chunk sizes.
- Chunks can be any shape or size.
- Create as many chunks as you can safely fit into memory. Note: Mono has a limit.
- No wait time for initial building of the chunks. Chunks load in, and away from you as you play.
- New: Single frame loading allows the entire voxel terrain to be loaded on the first frame, but incurs a delay.
- Chunks past a certain distance become disabled, and then re-enabled as the observer moves.
- A queuing system keeps chunk processing well balanced over multiple frames.
- All background tasks are successfully load balanced on the main thread.
- Your clients will not need a multi-core processor to run your game.
- New: 15 built-in volumetric shaders with built-in material examples for each will save you time.
- New: Built-in shaders provide diffuse, normal, and specular mapping for triplanar texturing.
- Easily simulate granite, marble, regular stone, stratification, and more, or roll your own shaders.
- Built-in methods for saving, and loading raw terrain data.
- Built-in methods for Improved Perlin, and Simplex Noise to create fractal geometry.
- Solid (volumetric) texturing.
- Solid fractal texturing.
- Triplanar texturing.
- New: Complete code overhaul with improved flexibility, and additional helper methods.
- New: Editor menu items for saving, loading, creating, and editing voxel terrain.
- New: Experimental (beta) voxel terrain editor (editor extension requiring Unity Pro) is included but not required.
Known Issues:
iOS is under investigation, but not currently supported.
Background and Overview:
I was inspired to create this after getting sucked into Minecraft for a couple months. Initially, I wanted to do the obvious thing and recreate Minecraft with all the goodies that everyone thinks it ought to have. But after a little thought, realized it would be so much more fun to implement a deformable voxel based terrain system instead. The result is a month of research and development and many late nights glued to the computer.
My intent with Voxelform, is to save you that time and effort, and to provide a very fun, efficient and reliable set of tools to get you off the ground running. The project is well documented on multiple levels and is intended for heavy customization. To that end, I’ve tried my best to help you understand the basics of what you’re looking at and provide suggested reading to understand the marching cubes algorithm.
The project should be helpful and entertaining for novices and advanced users alike. It’s definitely a scripting package, and it’s intended for programmers (intermediate C# skills recommended), but there’s something there to enjoy for everyone at every level.
I really can’t wait to see what the community does with this. The possibilities are endless!
If you have any questions, please feel free to either ask them here or send me a private message. I’m a one man operation, but will do my best to help in whatever way I can. If you feel that documentation is lacking in any area, please let me know and I’ll do my best to correct the situation.
Thank you so much for taking a look and for your feedback. It really means a lot.
- Mark Davis
