[TerrainEngine] Voxel Terrain : Smooth,Cubic,2D,Hexagonal Infinite Procedural Terrain

That's awesome! Thanks for the clarification!

 

Hey Dyox,

Not sure if you're aware, Astral Terra's kickstarter campaign went up.

Gotta say, your engine is really shining!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tethys/astral-terra-smooth-voxel-sandbox-fantasy-rpg

 

Yes thank you. The game is really great, I invite everyone to go to the kickstarter page.



Kickstarter : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tethys/astral-terra-smooth-voxel-sandbox-fantasy-rpg

 

Hey guys, thanks for the support! I have to say, none of this would be possible without TerranEngine. We needed a robust system that had the features we need and the look we desired. After months of research there was really only two options on the market - TerrainEngine or ProcWorld (a $60k plugin). The choice was easy and Dyox's framework has been great for us. In addition, our support and support for others has helped him keep TerrainEngine in development and fuel more features and improvements - which he in turn has then turned around and supported us with. We think it's a good example of what is possible between developers here in this awesome Unity community. Thanks again TerrainEngine and Dyox, we plan on using this technology for our next game project after Astral Terra as well.

 

@Tethys - Hey, the game looks very promising so good luck with the KickStarter. However, I wanted to give you a heads up that your account on Reddit may have been shadowbanned. Make sure you are logged out of Reddit and then look at your user page here. For me it shows 'page not found', whereas it should show your post history, etc (try viewing other users as an example).

Apologies if I'm wrong but obviously you want to use this for promotion so I thought it was worth mentioning. It happened to me once and was rather frustrating.

 

Thank you tethys.

I take this opportunity to post a new video showing all types of terrain and deformation in real time

 

Oh thanks for having our backs David! And Gratitude for your comments as well - appreciate it! Looks like we are all good now - will need to check on that every now and again now that we know that can happen.

 

Hey, FYI backed the Astral Terra kickstarter (and Greenlight), for an unusual reason - the alpha lets me experience TerrainEngine first hand, as I'm considering purchasing TE. Not that Astral Terra won't get a lot of play; a voxel RPG is A Good Thing, and I really enjoy the visual direction.

Been tinkering with the various free and pay voxel engines; came to the conclusion you expressed a few months back, that those "hello algorithm" packages - as neat and recommendable as they are - are just the tip of the iceberg for what's needed for a game-ready voxel system. Its worth some significant money to have good code already in hand, same as I'm already trading my money for Unity's time for the render engine, cross-compiler, etc.

 

Hey Dyox,

I know you said any explanations would be posted in the documentation, but I was wondering if you could comment on the way you went about simulating the water flow. Do you use the marching cubes algorithm for the water? I don't need an in depth description or anything, but any information you can provide would be much appreciated.

 

@guyal : I hope your experience will be good. But astral terra is not TerrainEngine. It's a good experience but not the real engine.Let me know when you have some feedbacks.

@Unitarian46 : It's not possible. I can't explain any systems due to the fact, it's a commercial product.

Some news.
TerrainEngine V8, Titan :
-20% Memory and garbage Optimizations.
-Construction Kit V5 Integration with a lot of features : (Undo/Redo manager, Copy/Past, Line Editor, Box Editor, Advanced GUI interface, Load/Save Files as map or Objects, Symetry system, Dynamic Textures, Moving voxels, Ice -> Water -> Rain -> Water + Temperature -> Ice, And a lot of new systems)

Some Screens :

 

@dyox - Am I correct in interpreting this "But astral terra is not TerrainEngine. It's a good experience but not the real engine." as "Its an older version, perhaps modified, without taking advantage of many upgrades that have been implemented more recently?" Or did I completely miss something and Astral Terra is not using TerrainEngine in any way?


PS The videos and screenshots are very interesting. When I'm ready to seriously consider purchase (December or January, tentatively), I'll post my actual TerrainEngine feature questions.

 

Greetings Guyal. We are not using the construction kit yet as it was still being working on last time we got a build. Of course Astral Terra is more than just Terrain Engine so that is why you might notice some differences in the way things look. We have filled it with custom assets as well as integrated another framework with it so it doesn't behave exactly like vanilla TerrainEngine, but more like a game that has TerrainEngine in it.

 

Ok now the few Xeno Galaxies fans will discover I'm using the TerrainEngine and will freak out, cause I have never shown any terrain, just my extremely customized marchingcubes space stations and recently the construction kit ships


I was passing by to post this tutorial I made : Integrating ultimate FPS with Terrain Engine.

It shows that this TerrainEngine not only delivers the beautiful terrain stuff, everybody saw that, but it's actually very well engineered and easy to customize. I purchased it as a whole voxel framework, not just a terrain, and i don't regret it one minute. Check it out, takes 4 minutes to replace the default Bootcamp soldier by UFPS:

(it's quite fast and technical, if you just want to see a stupid fps player shooting a palm tree, go to 3:28 )

By the way I did code and design the construction kit UI and some new tools (symmetry and magic wand), on top of Dyox 's systems, for my own needs - first alpha of the XG construction kit binary can be downloaded on www.xenogalaxies.com, for free but you need to register - just remember it's the first alpha.

I've done all that cause I profit from it : every client Dyox gets => more time spent on enhancing TerrainEngine !

 

@XenoGalaxies - Really nice work man! Like what your doing here and the construction kit is great! Gratitude for helping out with that, looking forward to trying it out in our project. I went and voted for you on Steam Greenlight, as well as Favorited and followed. We launched our Greenlight 3 weeks ago and are already 72% to the top 100! Good luck on your awesome project - if you try to crowd-fund again we will be behind you. I believe we are going to go to IndieGOGO as well with the flex funding plan.

 

Thanks.

BTW, the Astral Terra video where the wizard is creating a land bridge casually as he walked over the ravine was very interesting, as I took it as a sort of Frozone/iceman moment that points to slicker and more variable things that can be done with voxels besides the standard dig-dig-dig build-build-build

 

@XenoGalaxies : Thank you for your support. You're project is really awesome and i can"t wait to see the final result.
Nice Video, it's very simple and clear, thank you again.

@Tethys : Yes off-course, Astral Terra is more than TerrainEngine Experience. It's an very interesting game and is very promising.

About Construction Kit and TerrainEngine, V8 is coming really fast. Alot of new features like : Grass/Details/Trees Noise distribution. You can now set an Noise formula to any objects on Terrain (allow to create a beautiful forest, plains, grass plains, etc...)
And again, a lot of memory optimizations , like 3 bytes compression into one ushort, an improved Smart Pooling system, etc...

TerrainEngine + ConstructionKit V8 :

 

Awesome video! The new features on Construction Kit that work with Terrain Engine are so great. Love how you kind of "auto leveled" the terrain you wanted to place the house on first ( in one of the forest scenes). This is the icing on the cake! Booya!

 

Hey dude,

Some questions:

Is this available in the asset store?

Do you happen to have a lite version for iOS/Android etc?
I'm not sure how well this will work on mobile

Let me know your thoughts?

 

Hello MrEsquire.
First :

? No.

"Is this available in the asset store?", No.
"Do you happen to have a lite version for iOS/Android etc?" Yes TerrainEngine Works on all platform. (And ConstructionKit too) And it works great.
The major problem is triplanar for mobile (only on MarchingCubes terrain) For all other , it's perfect, just take "Pocket minecraft", increase range of view and quality and you have TerrainEngine. (Tested on Ipad and IconiaTab)

 

Respect dyox,

incredible engine ! Only one question, how much time needed to get to this "level" of development ?
I want to know that because I have to decide if I can afford the time to bring my current engine to your level.
(I will use my engine only for my game idea so I wont be a competition )

 

Thank you for the replies, Sir

 

dyox, are you still selling this engine? looks a good deal more robust than the other related solutions in the asset store.

i'd love to find out how proceed with my purchase inquiry. tried your email and private messages with no responses.

if any of the rest of you are clients of his, can you confirm that he is still supporting this tech?

 

Hello dodax. Yes i'm still working on it. I'm working on the V8 with multiple resolution of ConstructionKit and Terrain.
I will response to you email asap.

 

thanks for the response, dyox. i can't wait to check out your engine!

 

Really..... $3,418.25?

lol. I'll just sell my car, surf boards, and my body on the streets. That's 3 years net at my current job pay rate. whatever man. Good luck with that.

 

its clearly a awesome engine but the problem is you won't sell a lot. Studios who can afford such an add-on, won't use unity since unity is more a indy-engine.

 

With even blizzard using unity now you can't really say that anymore.

 

When is Version 8 going to be available?

 

You should sell it 10 Millions $... one sale and you can stop working. Great idea.

 

I did purchase it :

- smooth marchingcubes terrain
- custom volume settings per material / global smoothness settings
- really working multithread infinite streaming terrain code
- very optimized code ( Dyox is a pro game server programmer)
- chunk occlusion culling
- pooled gameobjects placement (trees or anything) with custom editors
- voxel fluid simulation
- biomes / noise combinations editor with an UI
- custom save system with custom binary serialization.
- custom voxel grid based pathfinding with steering AI examples.
- Gameplay examples inculded ( bootcamp soldier shooting voxels basic runtime editor)
- all that with a core framework that is well coded enough to allow some code reuse with cubes / hexagons / 2d like terraria
- And now the integration with the construction kit that allows to mix marchingcubes and prefab voxels

It's true that it's not for everyone, you need to be in the sweet spot of developers that understand the list of features I just listed, but don't have the time and the hardcore competencies (multithread ... ) to implement it but can 1- spend the money and 2- have enough competencies to actually build a game on top of it.

So if you re a small studio - or seriously want to start one, it's not so expensive, especially in countries where $3500 is the cost of a few dozens hours of contracting.

I'm not defending Dyox just for the karma, each new client makes him able to continue working full time on it - and I and the other happy customers profit from that

 

Sounds good. But too bad it is reserved to an elite. Here $3500 would buy a small house and land...

 

Hello dyox

I really like what you created here.

Ok I'm probably going to ask some stupid questions, I have to ask as I need facts.

The game I'm making doesn't need terrain creation at runtime or procedural terrain creation.

What I want is to be able to create my Vox terrain in scene view and also use Unity's standard terrain for back drops or non destructible parts of the scene.

So the main purpose is destructible terrain.

Also my pod type racer units will be moving up to 800 mph so I don't know if using Voxels is a good idea for performance? will it work well?

Are you planing on releasing a lite type version that only has destructible terrain interaction and remove the runtime and procedural features?

Regards
Mohoe

 

well 2.500 and the gui sucks, for this price u can make it better... its so very basic i know is not the important but.. 2500.... well there are 2000 that maybe are not to be included

 

its good price, cheap even..
(in here you could only get like 3 days c# beginner or unity starter course with that amount..)

 

And that is assuming you can find a coder smart enough to tackle the task as well. Procedural generation, dynamic worlds and the management of everything attached to it seems to be an area of specialization. The asset store has 3 very cheap, not ready for game production smooth voxel engines. There is the $3000 option here (game ready), and then the $60,000 pro option via Voxel Farm. When put into perspective, it's pretty easy to see that Dyox's TerrainEngine is actually very cheap and is the INDIE option/choice.

Someone without a budget of a few thousand dollars has no business trying to start a new business in game development. If it's just a hobby well then that person doesn't need TE, that person can just spend the $100 on a package that still needs a year of development and just do the work themselves. Assuming, again, they are smart enough to handle the challenge. Those of us serious about game development budgeted and then bought TE - and we all have games in production now. Also, as a result, Terrain Engine is 10 times better today than it was last year. If you have no budget for your core framework then you have no project - work hard, save money and come back at it when you do (this is just general development advice to the noobies who want to make something awesome but have no cash to do so). Wanting to make an awesome game and having an interesting idea and a FREE copy of Unity isn't enough, you have to have the infrastructure and the will to spend lots of money on something for an extended period of time while you develop and get it ready for the market.

 

I agree. People just don't imagine the amount of work needed to make a procedural smooth voxel terrain engine. The terrain generation itself is hard to do, then there is a lot of work on side tools like dynamic occlusion, dynamic pathfinding, vegetation....

I was wondering how is the draw distance with TE? Do some of you have some experience about that?

 

What a load of S***e.

 

Tethys, congrats on the Greenlight! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=205494242

 

No, is about as true as it gets, few thouthand dollars is nothing for even a small business to budget, bellow that you're just a one man or two man Indy team hoping to convert your work hours into cash but certainly no more of a business as any other hobbyist

 

Hey Guygal thanks! It's snowpocalypse 2014 over here so we had just got out of the house for the first time in 4 days, was sitting in the gym when some of our fans tweeted it. YES! Astral Terra has been greenlit, in a few months Steam will have it's first Terrain Engine powered game on the market (we are doing early access in March).

Ronan hit the nail on the head, there is a difference between hobbyist and business - even if you want to be a business and make and code every last bit, you will still need money to pay Valve in order to sell on Steam, PR firms and ad campaigns to get the word out about your game, membership fees, hosting, etc.

Have a great day and good luck everyone on your projects!

 

Hello.

First , thank for your support.
Congratulations Tethys Astral terra. This is very good news.
Thank you XenoGalaxies , indeed, it is much, much work.

MoHoe :

No , it's currently not possible to edit the terrain in scene ( Unity Scene view is too mush limited and need to have slower code for be usable , that will impact on in game performance)
Yes , you can mix TerrainEngine and Unity Terrain.
No lite version is planned.

neff11 :

Yes, Inspector GUI is very important in commercial game , indeed.
An engine is like an iceberg, the visual result is only the visible part of it.

I have a good new and a new video.
The good new : TerrainEngineV8 is coming soon ( in few days )
And the video with all features .

TerrainEngineV8 : Features

 

Thank dyox!

I'm so impressed with the current state of this and how fast its progressing.

I think on my third project I will make use of this and will purchase it with a smile on my face.

Regards
Mohoe

 

Thanks Dyox, this update looks awesome and is critical for us. This is good news, keep up the great work!

 

Excellent video!

Nobody knows what is the terrain draw distance of Terrain Engine? All the voxel engines I've tested are quite limited about that. I'm trying to determine if TE could suit my needs in the future.

 

@Casto - I believe the terrain draw distance in the new update with v8 is supposed to be even better because of more optimizations. Not sure yet as we don't have it yet. On our game you can see that the draw distance is pretty far and good enough for exploration.

In general, it is dependent upon the users machine specs really. It is a balancing game between stuff in environment and how far you want to see. For example, no monsters, no AI, longer terrain draw distance can be set. Also, scale of the terrain can be set - so a scale of 2 will show a further draw distance than a scale of 1, with the same amount of memory used. For Astral Terra, we use Scale 2. If you have a bunch of game mechanics happening (for example 20-30 ai running around on the terrain) then you have to make the draw distance shorter. It is a balancing act between content, draw distance and optimization. But in short, it is hardware dependent and will change based on how much ram you have and how strong your video card is and how optimized your content is.

 

Thanks Tethys! What you say definitely makes sense. I understand it is a balancing between a lot of things.
I guess Scale is the size of a voxel? A scale of 1 means it is 1x1x1 meter?

Just so I can get a better idea of the draw distance (even if it is an approximation), what could it be with a nude terrain (no plants, no trees) on a standard PC with 8Gb of RAM, a core i5 and a GeForce 660GTX? (with a scale of 1 to make things simpler)

 

Per your specs, you would be able to set the terrain to draw further than the user can see (because of mountains getting in the way), but again it depends on scale. For example, I will set scale to 2 and draw distance to 4 to -4, and because of the way the terrain is made, areas are naturally culled out because of mountains and hills getting in the way. Unless the user can fly, they wont see the edge of the generated terrain, just some hills behind hills. A trick we are using is the same thing you see in plenty of older games, we use a 3d skybox to throw some low res mountain geometry in there to surround the environment with background mountains. Another thing that helps balance this is actually the tree cover. With the right blend of tree and bush cover, draw distance doesn't become as important because the player cannot see through the forest anyway (except when standing on a mountain).Throw some distance fog and a surrounding 3d skybox with mountains, using the same textures as your dynamic mountains, and it is ALL GOOD.

Also, I wanted to update you guys on a new package we got to work with Terrain Engine. We purchased "Time of Day" from the asset store and had it working in Terrain Engine in under 5 minutes. "Time of Day" is a day/night cycle plug-in. We just removed the lights from our scene, dropped this in and set some parameters and Booya, day and night system. Really nice guys with good support as well. If your looking for a day/night system you might want to look into this, it is also reasonably priced (only $30 when we bought it).

 

Thanks again Tethys!

Yes apparently some tricks need to be used with voxel terrains to limit the view distance of the player. Hills and trees are good for that as you said.
Screenshot shows it well. If I understood well, on the screenshot you are using a scale of 2 with a terrain using 8xYx8 chunks. I don't know how many voxels each chunk has (16x16x16? 32x32x32?). Assuming it is 32x32x32, on this screenshot your terrain width is 2x8x32=512 meters. Which let you have a distance view of 256 meters as the player is in the middle.
Am I correct?

 

Yes, very close Casto. Its scale of 2, 4x1x4 and 16x16x16 You seem to have done your due diligence and know what your talking about in this kind of "specialized" area of game development. TE should work well for you, should you have the budget for it. We did similar research before we started our project in March and using TE. Looked at every package and way to do smooth voxel environments that we could find - almost a year later and TE is still THE VOXEL ENGINE to use if you want lots of features, fully functional and within an Indie budget ("pro AAA" Voxel engines like Voxel Farm cost $60k). Good luck with your projects Casto!

 

This is an amazing product (I am an owner) and can't wait for version 8! I'm actually still using version 6 but I have so many other projects and a day job building software that I can afford to wait for this upgrade. I'm actually using it in two projects now.