Introduction

Hi my name is Luke, (aka kellpossible) and I’ve decided to start a blog, just to share a few things. This holidays, I’m continuing work on the GSOC project which I started earlier this year: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kellpossible And getting it to a stage where I can commit it to trunk.

Another thing which I’m working on with a few friends is a game inspired by the likes of FTL and Artemis Bridge simulator. A cross platform (Android, Windows, Linux, Mac) java based cooperative space ship combat simulator. It’s specifically going to be designed with tablets and laptops in mind, as they are perfect for this kind of game, where being with your friends while you play it is made a lot easier with portable computing devices.  

Along with my GSOC project, I’ll be releasing a slow trickle of details and Ideas that we’ve been having for this game, along with progress updates.

To kick things off, I’ll mention that the damage/physics model for the spaceships will be voxel based. Most games I’ve seen which incorporate the concept of voxels in their damage or physics model see themselves restricted in the visual sense to voxels as well. Hand created polygon models look better by far than any low resolution voxel model that I’ve seen, but the problem is that usually they need to be slimmed down manually for use in the physics engine.  I’ve had an idea which hopefully will allow us to get the best of both worlds, with very little effort on behalf of the content artist. 

The idea is that the artist creates both a low resolution voxel representation of the ship at the same time as the polygon model. At export time, these two models (polygon and voxel) are intersected in cube shaped voxels:

As you can see, I’ve colour coded each section, which, now the properties of the voxel damage and physics model can easily be shown on the visual polygon model, just by affecting the geometry within the relevant chunk. Imagine, a section of the spacecraft gets blasted apart, well because we’ve simulated this using voxels, that can easily happen, the chunks will just blast apart. Another Idea which I’ve had is to take it a step further and break up the chunks automatically using fracture tools in blender to allow blasted chunks to look even more realistic, but we’ll save that for a later date.

The screenshot above is a very crude example, where the voxels have not been lined up with the polygon model during it’s creation. The reason for this is that there are no tools that I could find for easily creating minecraft style voxel sets alongside polygon modelling. This is very much a requirement. For the voxel features to line up with the polygonal features, this is something that will need to be done as the model is being created in blender.

So, this week I’ve been busy getting back into blender, and exploring the python API, which I haven’t touched, and learning how the operator system works much better, to create a voxel editing system in blender. The voxels are represented by cube meshes parented to an empty, and can be created by clicking on an adjacent cube, just like minecraft.

This work has also helped me get a much better understanding of operators in blender, which I can take back to my work on the snapping tools.