So I tried TerraVol but it wound up being broken and not working in 4.6 or 5.0. Waste of money. There is also Ruaumoko, MoleEngine, and Voxeland. None of them have been updated in about a year, and their devs all seem to be awol. Are any of them still worth the money?
I was looking for a terrain implementation that could represent steep cliffs well, and a voxel terrain plugin seemed the perfect way to do it, but now I’m not sure. Are there any other terrain utilities that are worth a look that can handle vertical faces? Preferably that can import a hightmap too, but as long as they’re open/extensible I could code that myself.
EDIT: The other option is, of course, to code it myself, but I unfortunately can’t spend the amount of time necessary to build a voxel terrain builder and all the tools necessary for working with it.
Well you don’t have to use a Voxel engine to get steep cliffs, or caves, or anything else.
If you know how to 3d model, you can 3d model your terrain and make it look exactly the way you want, then get some Vertex Color/Vertex Paint Shaders for Unity that way you can paint your 3d model terrain like you do a Unity Terrain, but that’s pretty much the only solid info I can give you. I don’t know much about Voxels.
Thanks N1. I’m definitely aware of 3D modeling the cliffs as an alternative, but I’m trying to avoid that if I can. We’re doing an expansive amount of terrain with primarily cliffs for elevation changes, so that would be a lot of 3D modeling work. Another issue would be that our 3D-modeled terrain would be immutable inside of Unity, which would clog up the pipeline considerably.
I completely understand what you mean, just wanted to throw the idea out there, because 3ds max and stuff has Mesh Deformation tools, works kinda like Z-Brush and Mudbox, you skulpt it, so give it like 10000 polygons, click and drag to make it look nice, then optimize the polygons. In like 5 minutes done LOL.
7 days to die has a good formula. They even have smoothly connecting voxels now. Not sure if the implementation details would be public, but the info for what they started with could be somewhere.
Actually, I may have been wrong about the devs all being inactive. It appears Voxeland’s dev is still active and working on Unity 5 support, so I was wrong about that. Anyone have any experience with that?
Can anyone (with more experience with voxel terrains, I guess) elaborate on the differences between Ruaumoko, Voxeland, MoleEngine, and TerraVol? Other than their reputation for support for the developer, they all seem to by very similar. I’m not sure how to make the decision, and can’t afford to buy all 4 to compare/contrast.
I haven’t gotten around to evaluating Cubiquity, but I can form a rough idea from the two threads. One of the bigger differences is that Cubiquity is written as a native library so it only supports Windows, OS X, and Linux. It does not support infinite terrains and appears to be limited solely to voxel tasks (ie it doesn’t handle foliage itself).
One thing I noticed from the demo video for Ultimate Terrains, that is not mentioned in the thread, is that the biome system is a visual node-based system. It isn’t the fanciest node system I’ve seen, but it is pretty nice nonetheless.
Between that and uTerrains support for platforms beyond desktops/laptops, infinite terrains, foliage handling, integration with RTP3, and a cheaper price tag, I think uTerrains is likely going to be a better deal than Cubiquity solely for terrains. I think it is setting itself up as a complete replacement for Unity’s terrain system.
Cubiquity still has some advantages as it is supposed to be capable of more than “normal” terrains. Two examples they’ve given were cube-style voxels (aka Minecraft-style) and more general purpose shapes (ie a planet-shaped mesh).
@Ryiah Thanks for the info. A voxel system is one of the few things I haven’t tried to do myself yet. It’s interesting that the C++ voxel system is the one that doesn’t do infinite generation, since it should have the better access to memory management. Then again, minecraft has a decent system and that was written in Java. The voxels might be huge, but maybe ‘voxel systems’ aren’t as scary as I thought.
I wonder if procedural worlds and or content will be a gaming standard in the future so that every game, no matter what it is (even telltale games), have a large degree of replay value.
Tomnnn if you’re looking into programming your own voxels, here is a really good (seeming) blog I found on the subject: Smooth Voxel Terrain (Part 2) – 0 FPS
The basic algorithm most of these voxel terrains seem to be using is marching cubes, which is open licensed and linked to from this blog.
I’ll check that out, thanks. My understanding of voxels goes as far as assigning block heights with perlin noise. I’m curious about 7 days to die’s actually smooth voxels.
I like how 7DTD does voxels a lot. Practically Minecraft voxels but with smoothing. Doesn’t work for our game unfortunately because we have a lot of landscape running in non-cardinal directions.
They have diamond shaped voxels for their terrain and then regular square ones when the user is placing building blocks. What kind of shape would you need for your game?
I’m the developer of Cubiquity so keep that in mind when reading my thoughts
I think one of the most important things to realize (as is already becoming clear from this thread) is that people have vastly different ideas about what a ‘voxel engine’ actually is. Some people think of natural terrain with Marching Cubes or other algorithms, some think of Minecraft terrain with textured cubic blocks, and some think of Voxatron style environments where everything is built of colored cubes. Throw in the old school engines used by Commanche, Delta Force, etc (which aren’t really voxel engines at all) and you have a recipe for confusion.
Next up, there is the question of what features a voxel engine should provide. Does it need procedural generation? Do the terrains have to be infinite? Should you be able to modify the terrain in the editor? Should you be able to modify them at runtime? Do you need to transform the terrain or have multiple instances? Do you want a custom pathfinding solution, or what about water simulation? There are so many factors to consider that simply calling something a voxel engine does not really help a user work out if it does what they need.
I won’t say where Cubiquity falls into all this as I’m not (only!) here to sell and you can check out the link above if you’re interested. But I will say that this is the reason why I make a free version of Cubiquity available for testing - without that I don’t think users could have any real idea of whether it will work for them. I do believe this is a problem with the other engines as I see a lot of people asking questions about them but no one actually showing off what they have made. I think a lot of people buy these engines and then find they don’t do what they need.
I bought uTerrains 4 days ago and I can tell it’s a great solution. It is very solid and it sounds like it has a lot of potential.
I used Ruaumoko a few months ago and honestly uTerrains is already far most powerful even if it’s the first release.
I haven’t tried Cubiquity so I can’t speak about this one but I think you won’t waste your money with uTerrains anyway.
