This side-project of Voxel, Light Engine and Lux Vacuos just when downhill after mid 2017. What I can say about them is that work but got too big and I don’t have the time to single-handle this, even if someones decides to help me I still don’t have time to organize and keep everything running.
The S3 host will remain operative and so the ADUS backend. The API will be shutdown at the end of the month and with that the Voxel Launcher. The apt server will remain and might be used for other stuff, I don’t know. The Twitter handle will remain but be used for other stuff. The accounts page will be shutdown.
The Lux Vacuos page might get a rework and the name used for other stuff that isn’t game-dev related, it depends but meanwhile this blog remains. Also gonna use subdomains for other stuff.
I think that’s everything so, see you in a next project or whatever I do with this page.
So…. It’s been a while since the last post, I’ve been busy with University and other projects.
Let’s start with Light Engine
Early this year there was a point in Voxel development that it was begin bloated with unused features so I decided that the project need to be detached in two repos, one with the engine and game itself. Also Infinity was dead so I removed everything from that and started from voxel’s code, removing game-specific code from the engine.
With that done I started adding features, the entire physics system was replaced with JBullet, the networking was rewritten, major changes to the UI where done and the integration with Assimp. Currently is in a transition phase where the old code is begin replaced.
There are plans for writing tools like a map editor, entity editor and so on… but the time doesn’t allow me to start working on that.
Now Voxel
So… Voxel development is halted for an undetermined time, I can only work in one project and porting Voxel to the new engine is very time consuming. I’ve done some work but the new physics system makes it a little complicated due to the infinite world.
Lux Vacuos itself
The only major change is the user account system that was replaced recently, apart from that everything is the same.
To end this, I really want to work on Light Engine and get Voxel to a decent state but the time is just too little to get everything done fast. Maybe mid-late 2018 I will start porting Voxel but meanwhile everything here will be quiet. That’s it for today post, have a nice day!
That’s it, the anniversary of Lux Vacuos and the second year of Voxel development.
Voxel
Has been 2 years since the start of this project, many things have happened in this short time, lets start by a video of the progress.
We started the year with the release of version 0.0.9, the new 0.0.10 version is in progress and is the most time-consuming update ever; it contains a lot of changes and rewrites to the code, new rendering system, new world system, nearly all the code is new. Also we have a new member, HACKhalo2, he has been doing all the rewrite and creating new stuff.
We launched a new update system for Voxel and support for .deb packages in Debian-based distros. With this the “snapshots” update channel become live.
The UI got a massive rewrite and a new layout system, designed to mimic a Window Manager.
The Deferred Renderer got an upgrade in the same way by using a PBR pipeline and diffuse irradiance, this feature made it’s way into Infinity.
More stuff is coming this year so keep close.
Lux Vacuos
This is the first year of Lux Vacuos.
The idea of Lux Vacuos is to keep all the projects in a single place and to share the most resource between them. The big addition is the new account system, designed to share the same account in different places. Other minor changes where the updated logos for all projects.
We have more plans for this year and want to make them reality. This is all for today so have a nice day!.
Heya, I’m HACKhalo2, the on again/off again secondary coder for Voxel (mostly due to real life issues sapping any energy I have). I’m going to be around doing things and stuff behind the scenes, helping Guerra as much as I can and trying to make Voxel the best it can be. Anyways, to the good bits of this Post.
Over the last couple of days, Guerra and I were banging our heads together trying to figure out why in the everloving hell Voxel was working flawlessly on his computer, but wasn’t working at all on mine. We both have different OS’s and hardware, which is great when developing a game. It also sucks a whole lot of golf balls through garden hoses when a bug like this pops up. And it was literally the dumbest bug there could be, that shouldn’t of broken everything, but it did.
In the F_Tessellator shader file, line 26, is a vec3. That vec3 used to be a vec4, and that vec4 broke the Tessellator for literally every system and every OS, except systems using nVidia GPUs. Why was nVidia spared from this horridly stupid bug, you might ask? There are two ‘theories’:
nVidia is lazy as the Duck Hunt Dog and just likes to laugh at you while you waste hours tracking down stupid bugs that should be throwing parser errors anyways.
There was also an GLSL extension Voxel was using that was nVidia specific (or at least only currently implemented on the GeForce drivers), ARB_shading_language_include, that loved to completely crash the JVM if used outside it’s little safe space. I wrote a co-preprocessor, the ISL (Includes Shading Language), to mimic and extend this behaviour for Voxel so all platforms can benefit from it. There are plans to extend the ISL farther to make Voxel’s GLSL shaders more dynamic, but that’s down the line. I’ll make a blog post about the ISL next week sometime.
The WordPress Theme code used in this page is now available using the GNU GPL 3.0 Licence. All the code and assets are available here: WP-Theme. Please be aware that this code is used specifically with this page, we don’t recommend creating a site with the theme because has some stuff hardcoded, instead recommend to only contribute with code.
This is the new web page and logo, here all news or related stuff will be published.
The major change was remove of the Forum, it will be replaced soon, the accounts system was moved to other server to prevent downtime if the main server goes offline, the new page is available here: Accounts. Other change is that the AWS S3 server now uses a custom domain. Other major change is the new RESTful API that allows more easy development for 3rd party tools, is in development but will be available soon.
