The Inner Space of Voxelmancy

Thanks!

Dear Smokejumper can you please confirm what the actual numbers are? There are some things that are fun to experiment with, but figuring out whether the precision is 32 or 48 or 56 or whatever is really, really dull and definitely does not help with beta testing!!!

I agree, I worked in Blender and that's the way you work on shapes, it would be cool if we could do that here as well

So using the information I gathered from here and more Google searches than I can recall about Voxels, I began experimenting with a voxel simulator app to visualize my understanding of what is going on.

I made a small grid of 100 x 100 x 100 shapes that follows the paste dominance and corner position boundary rules that Landmark uses.

My default shape is a 84 x 84 x 84 cube. Why 84? Because the best run of cubes I have in game on a voxel wall has 42 increments in size from dot to stock. I wanted to limit my simulated environment to only voxels I can actually recreate in game via reactors and what I have on my wall. If anyone has a run of cube sizes with more than 42 increments, I would love to get my hands on it.

So here is a screenshot of a spaceship Obj 3D model I got free off the web rendered using a standard mesh etc no voxels here:



Here I have voxelized the Obj model scaled to fit in the 100x100x100 shape grid. Now we have something we know we can build in Landmark, so far so good...


This is the result of 10 passes of my smoothing formula which limits all shape corners so that all voxels in this model are creatable in Landmark.

I really like how the wings.fins and nose did not get eaten. Also not shown here, the inside is hollow and smoothed as well such as the cockpit and cargo bay.

P.S. Please excuse the poor model lighting, this is my first 3D app since my Amiga days.

Why can't i find Bob's excellent Voxelpedia in Google?

By the way cool Aliens Dropship

It is so pre-Alpha that even Google has not heard about it yet

You can find it on Bobs D:\Data drive. Under projects.

Very interesting. Are you allowing vertices to roam? That's where the rest of the 128 positions should be, and allows some shapes that simply aren't possible without it. (Not the premade shapes in the tray, though, those are all possible without.)

At the moment I'm just trying to make sure it follows the stock boundary rules that a corner can't go more than half a cube width in any direction from its healed state origin. I still think it's cheating a bit so I'm creating some simpler shapes to debug with. With so many pieces of this being new to me, its a bit rough figuring out if my results are correct.

So the moon is not made of cheese after all and its voxels right ?

Correct and it also is not really there unless you are looking at it.

I would like a way to get to the moon... need more moonstone... and I want to build a giant eyeball that's looking at everyone....

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this up! I often wondered what the actual space was for each micro shape, just didn't have the time to contemplate it. Yayy one less mystery in the voxel world for me.

Explains warping nicely.
Unfortunately, now I will go to bed and dream about voxel/shapes in a more coherent manner than previously.

This gives me an idea....

Several months later...

I agree with Boomdiggety - two weeks ago I would have looked at this post and fried my puny brain-pan. Now I understand it easily (keep forgetting about the darn inlay techniques). I would love to have more advanced tools/knowledge for voxelmancy.

Also, are there any plans to let us be able to "group" a set of voxels containing a build/object, or to let us move the data from Point A to B? I have a background in 3D rendering, and not being able to drag or move an object continually surprises me.

This as well - I love that we have the ability to have our shapes warp to each other... however it would be better still if we did have the option to turn that "off". I'm trying to build a ramp in the middle of a platform that has staggered "stairs" outlining it, coming in to join at the sides of the ramp. But it looks really terrible with the warping. I'm new so I still haven't figured out if there's a way to prevent it.

Peace, Elhaz.

This is voxel land. The world is composed of cubes the size of the default cube. Some you can see, some you can't. But they are always there. Warping is a function of corners on neighboring cubes moving as the player changes one. Shrink one cube and it neighbor has to get bigger. Some of this can be avoided by roaming vectors, but mostly it is a fact of life in voxel land.

+1

I'll just add that, because some people I meet often have difficulties in understanding this point.

All the ingame universe is made of cubes, and there can be no empty space. Every pixel is filled but by one and only one cube.

The air itself is made of cubes, and warps. Where there is a cube, there can be only ONE cube, touching the 26 other surrounding cubes. If you modify it, it needs to "distort" the 26 others to fit exactly inside them. That means that you can't have a "ON/OFF" warping function, wich would need to be in an empty space.

The only way to avoid warping is to make a prop, wich exists outside the voxel universe (it's something else). It seems we'll be able to do it "soon" (TM), but without knowing in how many months or years

edit : err

A prop or a detached voxel space/coordinate system. The difference is being able to continue to manipulate its voxels after it's been converted. Miguel talked about something like that here and here, although he was talking about the object changing as a result of physics.

Which is not to say that Landmark will do this, only that there's another way to handle it.

Yes, you're true.
I just wonder what it would give server side (and client side) with a detached voxel space/coordinate system for each prop that a player could build on a single claim

I think there are ways to work around that cost, such as a cap on the number of player assigned voxels per claim (all unique spaces, total). There's a potential for optimization too, if a player can use this sort of thing to identify repetitive structures. And that could improve building, because you could modify one and it would propagate to the other copies automatically. *continues dreaming*