IOTD: VoxRend

VoxRend, by Niunio

From a week ago or so, there are a big interest about voxels at the Allegro's forums.

Some months ago I sent an IOTD screenshot of my UnOptimised Voxeled Landscape Renderer, a tiny demo about how to build a voxeled landscape renderer with few lines (only 16!).

From that UOVLR until today I've fixed and added capabilities to that demo, and before the end of 2003 I decided to develop a pure voxeled game engine. I named it VoxRend.

So, here you have the current status of the engine, that you can see at these screenshots.

Currently, the engine allows to create and use tile-map landscapes, using 64x64 tiles (not disk format or map editor available though), control the ray-cast depth, so you can render large maps with low memory needs and a fairly playable speed, and fixed-point trigonometric functions more accurate than Allegro's ones.

The Todo List is long:

Paralaxed ceiling renderization.
Classic fast 3D sprites.
Fully voxeled 3D objects, may be Ken's VOX format.
Portable and flexible file format to store maps.
Customizable fog effect.
A bunch of helpful functions and utilities to make game developing easer, i.e. accurate one-ray-only cast, dynamic maps, CSG, BSP and/or Quad-trees...
Fully usable and customizable editors for maps and VOX objecs.
Lots and tons of optimizations here and there that (hopefully) will speed up this thing a lot.

I'll release VoxRend when the first two items of the Todo List became finished, so you'll need to wait a bit more, may be two or three months more. I'm too busy now.

For those people that can't wait, I'm working in a full explanation of my UOVLR demo, including sources and ideas, that will be published at Pixelate #14 next month.

Happy coding!

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