Seed of Andromeda

[Gears]

Not sure if any of you guys have seen this yet, but over the past few months this guy Ben Arnold has been working on a voxel game called "Seed of Andromeda", which is showing by far some of the most interesting use of voxels for a blocky building game.

Just an example of the engine.


One of his most recent additions to the engine:


He hasn't released much information about gameplay, but he's stated that there will be both creative and survival gamemodes, and he'll be aiming for a more sci-fi centered game.

Thoughts?

[Chomamonka]

Dang, someone keep am eye this guy. It's a beautiful engine. If he could get some btw level gameplay in there this could get real interesting.

[FlowerChild]

A few seconds in and I'd consider the size of his voxels to be his first mistake. Right away puts it into "not going to happen" territory for me.

Yes, that's beautiful and all but welcome to pathfinding and general game mechanic hell. One of the first things that peeked my interest in 7 Days was them not making that error.

[Stormweaver]

I think I'd be a lot more impressed if the block textures meshed better with the Level-of-detail shenanigans he has going on there; it takes away from the presentation a lot.

That said, it really does look quite pretty, and honestly I'd like to have a much, much better PC by the time it's done so I can splash out and just explore the world for a few weeks.

[nmarshall23]

I think I'd be a lot more impressed if the block textures meshed better with the Level-of-detail shenanigans....it takes away from the presentation a lot.

Yea, I found that nauseating, And his tree's look odd. FC might be right, those Voxel look like an odd size compared to the player. But it's hard to judge. With his flying around..

What impresses me, finite water that doesn't require each voxel to update! Lateral movement of sand? Avalanches? The engine is very impressive. Voxel game engines are maturing very fast. Mojang has to be asleep to not see that the end is nigh.

[Gilberreke]

A few seconds in and I'd consider the size of his voxels to be his first mistake. Right away puts it into "not going to happen" territory for me.

Aren't his voxels about the same size as Minecraft? I think it's the flying around and the ginormous world height that makes them look small.

Looks to me to be a great engine for a good designer to develop a game on, but from what I see, I doubt the core game is going to be that good.

[dawnraider]

Yeah, when he goes right up against the terrain, they look about the same. The size of the world is massive, though. The sharp transition between voxels and the blended terrain I don't really like, but given refinement, I think it could turn out really well. Some of the mechanics shown there are awesome, too. I'll have to keep an eye on this to see if the game itself ends up good at all, put I think it has definite potential.

[Sarudak]

The voxels are half the size of minecraft. Which really means 8 times as many blocks in the same space...

[Gilberreke]

The voxels are half the size of minecraft. Which really means 8 times as many blocks in the same space...

Yeah, okay, that's micro block territory, that's too much.

A three block high character might work, but more than that and it's definitely too small to do anything useful with your voxels. Imagine having to build a castle out of micro-blocks *shudder*.

[Wafflewaffle]

A few seconds in and I'd consider the size of his voxels to be his first mistake. Right away puts it into "not going to happen" territory for me

I kind of expected RTH to have smaller blocks given you added half blocks and corners to BTW, never even considered the implication of that in performance and AI behavior.

Guess that will to each me not to guess anything about RTH.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I suspect resolution of the world is probably one of the most important considerations in designing a voxel based game, as so many other things fall out of it. I've put a heck of a lot of thought into it these past few months, and one of the things that immediately turns me off new voxel games is when I see people immediately jump to the "high res = better" surface level conclusion, seemingly oblivious to the ramifications.

Like I said, when I first saw a 7 Days video, what immediately struck me about the game, and what made me take it seriously was that they hadn't done that, when it seems to be an epidemic amongst many of the other in dev titles I'm seeing.

Remember that Notch said his biggest regret about Minecraft was the inclusion of slabs and other partial blocks. I personally wouldn't go that far as I think having some ability for aesthetic detailing is beneficial to these kinds of games, but his statement really says something.

[dawnraider]

Yeah, I do think it would be hard from a gameplay and performance perspective to get anything done. The performance reasons have been stated, and one of the things I like about MC's large voxels is he ability to easily build things. That would definitely be more difficult with smaller blocks. While it would be nice to have that extra freedom, I don't think that it would be worth it.

[Gilberreke]

Yeah, I suspect resolution of the world is probably one of the most important considerations in designing a voxel based game, as so many other things fall out of it.

Any opinion on variable sized voxels? I've seen a few games do it adequately, but I'm right on the fence if it's a good idea. It does fix the problem of having the world be higher resolution and still allowing the player to actually build things in it.

I like the simplicity of Minecraft where everything is a standard voxel. But like Notch said, even allowing for slabs opens up a can of worms, because now it breaks immersion if I can't combine different slabs on top of each other.

[Gears]

The developer of the mod wrote a response to the posts here: http://www.reddit.com/r/seedofandromeda ... on/ccdeubl

Quoting it here,

Hey everyone! I just thought I would address some of the things you were talking about. There are two main reasons that I chose a block size that is 1/8 the volume of a Minecraft block. The first, is that it makes movement up and down hills more natural. If you notice from some of my videos, when walking up hills you do not need to jump. The second is that you can build structures at a more detailed resolution. I played a lot of Minecraft and did not really like the limitations that the meter sized blocks provided. I felt that reducing the width of the blocks by half was a healthy compromise between heavy performance problems and a poor resolution. As for pathfinding, sure a higher resolution makes pathfinding more difficult, but its still doable. Corners will probably need to be cut to achieve good performance, but in the end it should be fine.

It is my philosophy that you should not start off by telling yourself that something cannot be done just because it has not been done. For this reason I am not taking the easy way out and using large blocks. This is easily reversible, but I am designing the engine with small blocks in mind right now. If we have the possibility to achieve a smaller resolution and correct pathfinding, should we not go for it?

On the subject of building with smaller blocks, you will not be forced to place the small blocks one at a time. There will be alternate building options, and there will be a standard option that lets you place groups of 8 blocks in a cube if you are more into Minecraft style construction. In addition there will be a way to destroy multiple blocks with one swing using a pickaxe, if the skill and attribute requirements are met.

I agree that the border between the heightmap terrain and the voxel terrain leaves much to be desired... but this should improve in the future. It is not easy to achieve a natural transition from cubes to flat terrain, and it is not helped by the new distortion introduced by the round planets. The seam will never fully dissapear I believe, but I feel that it is better to have this seam than to remove far terrain.

I am not fully opposed to scaling the resolution up to Minecraft style resolution, but I only want to do that if the majority of players agree.

Thanks for your interest and feedback guys! -Ben

[FlowerChild]

Errr...ok. Didn't really want to turn this into some kind of multiple board discussion, so please leave my name out of it in the future if you're going to post stuff like that, as I really don't need the extra dose of drama should thing spiral out of control. Remember: if I wanted to comment directly on a game to its creator, I'd do so on their forums (which I've done on multiple occasions in the past), and if this kind of thing becomes par for the course, I'll just shut up and keep my opinions on other games to myself on these forums.

As for his response:

<snip>

EDIT: You know what? This can not possibly end well. Either it'll start some unwanted drama, or I'll actually wind up convincing the guy and it will result in an increased amount of serious competition for RTH.

So, thanks, but no thanks. I'm out, I'll be much more careful talking about this kind of analysis in the future, and thread locked.

[FlowerChild]

Ok dude...bitching about getting a warning here, over there, is a sure route to drama, and a good ban hammering.

If you want to express opinions to another dev: go for it. Just don't drag me into it.