Stainless, on 15 March 2013 - 09:49 AM, said:

The world is infinitely big. The mountains in the background are actually quite far away from the camera. I think this will become better visible when there will be more details in the scene (trees and other stuff).

Stainless, on 15 March 2013 - 09:49 AM, said:

I think what you mean are the transparent debug boxes that show up whenever the geometry has changed. Everything is still so work in progress that we didn't remove them for the video.

The alien world sounds like a cool idea, I will try this.

We just published a new video showing our completely rewritten terrain engine. Things are becoming pretty again, but of course, everything is still in a very early stage. Especially the jaggy material intersections and normals still have to be fixed. And of course there will be no grass in holes you just created in the final game

Reedbeta, on 23 February 2013 - 12:29 AM, said:

Thanks, that will come in handy. In case anybody is interested, we wrote an article about the grass rendering in our prototype: http://upvoid.com/de...rototype-grass/

Thanks for the positive feedback! It's motivating to hear that.

Reedbeta, on 22 February 2013 - 06:15 PM, said:

Yup, our new engine already contains soft, dynamic shadows. Expect some screenshots soon. We'll probably also add some kind of SSGI or at least SSAO, but at the moment we are focusing on the terrain and the overall architecture of our engine.

TheNut, on 22 February 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

While the idea behind marching cubes is simple (and of course it has proven to work well in many situations), I think it's not as elegant to implement when it comes to all the cases you have to handle. With dual contouring, we only have two possible cases in each cell.

TheNut, on 22 February 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

In the prototype you see here, absolutely no data compression is used, we simply have chunks of float arrays containing density values. In our new system, we have a more sophisticated approach for the terrain data, allowing sharp edges and shapes like arbitrarily rotated cubes by directly saving intersection planes btween different materials. We'll post a devblog article about this soon.

TheNut, on 22 February 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

Yes, we require OpenGL 3.1 plus geometry shaders. The Intel HD3000 card is the minimum configuration we currently plan to support. If there ever will be enough users with older cards, writing fallback solutions for those geometry shaders might be an option.

The grass is currently a very primitive implementation. Of course, when you have a really high viewing distance, you don't want to render grass billboards everywhere. We are currently experimenting with blending into grass textures smoothly. Turned out to not be that easy.

I'll post updates here whenever we have something new to show. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask. We also try to post technical articles in our devblog section on a regular basis, so if there is anything you would like to hear about in detail, we are open to suggestions!