Laircraft: Voxel Engine

Welcome to the forums for Laircraft! For now please either keep support requests here or on the Trello board: https://trello.com/b/XBp4HPmQ/laircraft

This means I don't have to reply to people individually via email and save a lot of time. The more time I save the more time I can spend fixing bugs!

If you are looking for tutorials they can all be found on my vimeo profile page: https://vimeo.com/user15077144

Documentation can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0-9u0TALF10OFY5TEtiOC1Nek0?usp=sharing
Asset Store Link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/79820

 

Finally live!

 

main menu and save game?

 

Its all in but I took the engine down whilst I add higher quality textures and lighting. I was trying to prevent piracy but people where commenting it didn't look good enough.

Edit: Oh wait its not taken down :/ Guess it is pending a review
Edit 2: To clarify there is indeed a main menu and multiple save and load files for worlds. It should be there for the demo's

 

Add Hands animation and fps hands, add guns shot,bow atd...add AI

 

Umm yeah you will get far in life with some manners...

 

I looked at the history of johny256's posts and they are all very similar to that style. Maybe English isn't his native language? Anyways, his posts generally don't seem polite.

 

I was thinking that as well but frankly its no excuse. Takes 2 seconds to Google please in the language you are trying to learn

 

Hey folks,

The engine ended up not being depreciated in the end, I submitted an update earlier that day then the depreciation after and it seems the update overwrote the depreciation so it stayed live. Once I found out I realised we have made good progress on lighting and applying post effects to the scene.

MASSIVE thanks to Gabro Media for helping me out with this. check out their great stuff here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/search/page=1/sortby=popularity/query=publisher:11114

Anyway thought I would post to show progress on lighting and show the direction this engine is headed.

 

Hello.
Does this asset has TPS mode?

 

Hey Takapi,

Sorry for the delayed response I was at my brothers wedding and vowed not to work!

Anyway sorry but I don't know what a TPS mode is so I doubt it has it! However I am very open to new features if they are interesting, what is a TPS mode?

Cheers!
Jason

 

Thank you for your reply and congratulations! 　
I want to operate while watching my character.
For example, like Cube World.

 

Hmm do you mean Third Person Shooter mode? If so what you really mean is an over the shoulder view, this is Very easy to organise, you simple move your camera behind and above the character and job done

 

Oh,that's right.

 

Adding Ai in laircraft? next Update?

 

Hey Johny,

Sorry for the slow reply I have been on holiday. Care to elaborate on what you mean by AI? (Enemies, animals, NPC, etc)

Either way it wont be immediately next, I am still working on ironing out the bugs in the full PBR lighting system which is next, then after that my next task is going to be a minecart system so it would have be to at least after I do those.

 

impressive asset! How could I missed it? So you will add AI any way in the future? Then I will purchase.

 

Cheers glad you like it

I will indeed although again which ai? I have a full roadmap of stuff on Trello and generally jump around depending on what people are asking for:

https://trello.com/b/XBp4HPmQ/laircraft

Minecarts was a request from my very first customer so its going in first after the lighting update, after that I don't see why Ai couldn't be next. I will probably start with some basic enemies since with the new lighting I have a proper day/night cycle in there

 

simple enemy ai like in minecraft since your asset is based on that heavily. So animals and enemies that attack. simple stuff nothing fancy, like minecraft

 

Fair enough! Yeah don't see why it couldn't be next on the list I hesitated to add animal A.I/movement since there are tons of packs on the store with animal animations and controllers so thought it might be wasted effort on my part to have them in the first version.

 

just purchased! When can we except version 1.1?

 

:O so glad I am working on it as we speak! I hope to have it store ready in a couple of weeks. However for now you can preview it. If you drop me an email to support@laireongames.co.uk with your invoice number I can get you added to the repository.

I have made a lot of improvements since the current version on there but not ready to commit them yet (still ironing out some shader and performance issues with lighting)

 

How strict is the 2017 version requirement? Could I port to ~5.5 with reasonable effort?

 

Yup should be fine, it was running on 5.6 for a long time. The reason I had to upgrade to 2017 was because on import the world would be grey in 5.6, but if you restarted Unity it would fix it but it was a bad experience for customers to first have with the engine.

If you drop me an email and get hooked up to the repository then it should be easier to get up and running with 5.5

 

Thanks!

For posterity the only compiler error in 5.5.4f1 is that the Mesh api doesn't yet have the RecalculateTangents() function. A quick google and you can find several examples of this and be off to the races.

One of the shaders (Standard/Cutout) also has an interpolator count error. Pulling SV_Position out of the input struct sorts this, the surface shader should handle that bit for you anyway.

Excited to dig in!

 

LaireonGames, when will the minecart system and hunger following? And advanced AI?
Thanks!

 

Sweet glad it was painless Let me know if you have any issues, I am going to put a 1.1.1 out soon to fix some bugs I found in 1.1. I do recommend you email me with your invoice so I can hook you up to SVN. Then you dont need to reimport as much for each update I do

 

Minecart will be next! Hunger is coming soon as a task I have given to someone I have hired and hope to keep on long term, gave him something slow to start instead of jumping head first into the engine

A.I actually I had to stop, it was going to be finished but the person I had hired to help me let me down so i will have to tackle it after the minecart

 

Also right now progress is slower than normal since I have my full time 9-5. I hope to be finished with that in 2-3 weeks though and back on this full time

 

Great thank you!

 

Question: is this project contains controls for mobile? Such touch actions, etc.?
I know it's required optimization

 

Basically, yes! Unity events are extremely portable so clicks and such usually automatically translate to touches instead.

So if you made an Android build with the store version, as an example since I have briefly tested Android but not iOS, you could look around and if you happened to be close enough to a block and tapped on it then you would start to break it. However you wouldn't be able to move around until you implemented your own on screen joystick but that's pretty easy.

As you have no doubt already read I don't, currently, officially support mobile but I know one of my customers was trying an Android version and so far as I know he is getting on fine with it

 

I've bought, please send me Unity3D project, Open in Unity button is not working, idk why ;/


My licence is in pdf on your email

Also please give me the access for all stuff with updates
I am going to develop it for mobile. Thx

 

Sweet glad to hear it! Just sent all the welcome/setup emails

 

Awesome 2.0 update! Thank you!

 

Glad you like it If you find any bugs please feel free to fire them my way!

 

Hi - I'm about to purchase your product because it looks like it has a ton of value. My only hesitation is from not knowing whether I'll be able to use code to control the functionality demonstrated in the UI you guys created. For example, I'd like to see a code snippet that generates a procedural terrain with biomes. I saw a video where this is done through a built in UI in Unity, but I didn't see how I would control it in code. I have the same question about all the other functions that are being demo'd through the custom UI.

 

Don't mean to spam in here.. just wanted to clarify what I'm asking: as an example, how would I go about modifying the values in the biome editor at run time when a user starts a new game, along with any other settings in there and then generate a new world based on those values?

 

Hey Jebediahh,

Ah ok with you, yeah thats certainly possible! So all the UI you are talking about are just custom Unity editors and inspectors so they are all code driven. So if you want an equivalent at run time you just need to hook the same method calls up to your own UI.

Each window will have its own considerations to work properly however. E.G to edit biomes at run time is no problem but of course at run time they are in use! So you would see a mix of the changes if the engines not paused as the old biomes are still present and the new ones are spawning in. So in this case you would need to ensure the game is paused and probably want to clear and reload the world once the user confirms the changes.

Basially yup I don't see any reason why you couldn't change the settings at run time, but you would need to do a bit of work to consider each editors new needs at run time.

 

Hi !
Question: How could I disable the random train generation and set up a custom-made terrain without breaking the whole code?
Thanks for the awesome project btw

 

Hey! So glad you like the project

Ok hmm.. I think what you want there is to basically make your own save file. How it works, if there is a save file no terrain is generated. So if you run the engine once to make the terrain you are happy with, then edit and save the terrain (saving will be automatic so long as you have it checked to be).

Then find your save files, typically in my documents, if you look at the console in Unity it tells you what is being saved where. Once you have them, move them into your project, then you need to edit the Saving classes to read from those files instead of the other location, this should mean every player will see your preset world. However, if they reach the edge of your world a new one will keep generating! So you will need some logic to account for that.

Hope that helps!

 

I wish everything you draw in these giant editor lists was a scriptable object not a monobehaviour. There's no code that necessitates a class like biome being a monobehaviour, and it'd be a lot more modular as an SO.

The goal being I can pick a handful of things of a given type when the world is generated so each world has a different set of available things (for flavor). World A might have Goblins, Orcs, Dragons. World B randomly picks Skeletons, Hydras, and Bats. Whatever.

It would also make the MainScene safe from version updates. If BlockDatabase is an SO containing an array of Block SO's it doesn't matter if you move the BlockManager object or whatever around, the data is separate from the component.

And if you still want the big editor window to view them all side by side you can just scrape over the project and load all the SO's of whatever type.

(Also I just love ScriptableObjects...)

 

Hey Brown Boot,

Scriptable objects is something I had in mind since the start but it didn't make it into the first version for essentially the same reason you want them, I don't like them I don't have as much experience with them and found it fiddly working with them whenever I did so it wasn't my first thought, so for first release I thought it best to stick with what I know with the hope of it keeping the code simpler to understand for others at the same time.

I did reconsider this for 2.0 since I do agree a lot of the storage classes are better suited as SO instead but 2.0 took much longer than expected and I didn't want to delay it even more.

Updates between 2.0 and 3.0 are supposed to all be about cleaning and tidying from 2.0, plus getting player water into a better state, so it seems like a good chance to look back into SO's. I will stick them back on the Trello board as the feature that shifts it into 3.0 (since it requires a significant change to everyones projects)

 

Hi, I have purchased your Laircraft voxel engine. I am going to develop its mobile version. So issue that i am facing is Mono in Profiler which take 0.7GB even now when I have disabled many options like Herds, weather, Enemies, Trees and crops, Decorations, Experience Manager and others which are independent of Biome. Now I want to minimize number of Biomes but I can't, they are all interrelated. So please guide me about this issue. If there is any other suggestion to minimize RAM usage.

 

Hey Uwasimu,

Ah ok disabling all that is not going to give you much RAM back, even biomes are going to have almost no impact on your memory! The biggest thing there is to remove the upfront allocation in the ChunkManager (looks like you have already done that though) and to take a look at the builders. The mesh builders take up the most memory because they hold all the information for a chunk, each vertice, uv, block type, light etc. and if your chunks are 16,128,16 as the default is then its a Lot of information!

You have two options here, you can reduce the number of mesh builders which will mean you will see more hiccups or blank chunks if you move and look around too quickly or you can reduce the height of your chunks. Both should have a significant impact.

To reduce the number of mesh builders find and edit this variable at the top of the ChunkManager file:

Code (CSharp):

1.         const int MaxMeshBuilders = 150;

I also wrote some notes about mobile considerations here, I'll stick some more info about memory into the file when I get a chance: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16COBxW6rZD2WG0FVMHHpKBHw4YdtDhJlBTRz0idq9sA

 

LaireonGames Really thankful for your reply. "const int MaxMeshBuilders = 150;" this help me alot.
Other biggest issue I have are texture. I have Samsung Galaxy S6 edge + on this device texture are working fine and game is also working fine. But device which have RAM 2GB on that devices game is working properly but textures are Gray, can you please guide me is this happening due to Texture array or RAM or any other cause?

 

No worries! Hmm.. grey textures could be because it doesn't support texture arrays but it could also be because its the wrong version of D3D, DirectX or OpenGL etc. You can try forcing the version to be a higher one and if it crashes on that phone its likely why. Screen shot attached is what I mean on Windows, there is likely a similar setting for Android etc. This is the Player settings btw within Unity.

P.S so to see these settings you uncheck auto graphics api as I have, then you remove the older version so there is only the latest as a test to see if that is the problem. You can also do the opposite. Remove the latest version and see if the older version causes the phone that used to work to now render in grey

 

I am already using latest graphics API for android mobile which support Texture array OPENGLES3.0. but Texture are gray, I stuck at this point.
Game is working fine. Not crashing on any device, Problem is just textures now.

 

Hmm.. sorry I am not sure what other advice I can offer! I still don't officially support mobile since I have not had a chance to test on a range of devices to look for common pitfalls etc. that would help here.

All I can really say is the usual debugging stuff. Try and narrow down the difference between the devices, OS etc, try adding in a simple textured cube/mesh in front of the camera to confirm if it is the texture arrays or if its just graphics in general.

I am always happy to help and give advice but until I officially support mobile I can't really look into device specific issues and even then its not likely I can afford a range of devices to satisfy everyone

 

Ohh, That's Ok.
As you were saying, I have already tried single texture instead of texture array then textures were shown. So basically the problem on mobile devices are texture arrays. Can you please highlight script where you are assign texture to blocks from texture array so I can see there what I can do there.
I am really week in Texture Array, Don't know how to use them.