Untitled Project Part 7 (Patreon)

I want to develop this game FAST. I want to make sure that alongside the creation of this new game, that developer tools are available for users so that they can make their own maps. The problem is that development tools can take a while to make. That's why I'm trying to be smart and make use of existing tools and simply making my game compatible with said tools.

As an example, there is now a pipeline from Blender to Unity (as an fbx), that allows one to sculpt, paint, and export a file that can be read by my voxelizer.

That brings me to the second new thing. There are now layers for the terrain. With the caveat that only 2 layers are possible (with 2 more sub layers): grass, dirt, concrete, and damaged concrete.

This allows us to have a grassy field (with grassy patches), and structures made out of concrete.

This brings me to the third new thing, data compression. As I said before, memory quickly becomes the bottleneck for a game like this with so many voxels. Optimizing memory is key to keeping the game stable and the map big. So, all data for a voxel is packed into a single byte float. This is how it works.

A float byte has 255 possible values (from 0 to 1):

A map voxel has 2 properties, how damaged it is (from explosions etc.) and if it's grass or concrete.

The way I packed it is as follows:

if the float byte is more than 0.5 (the middle), then it will be a concrete voxel. From there split it to find out how damaged it is. This greatly reduced memory further by half. The map can now be a little bit bigger!

Stay tuned!