The Cave

[fugue]

The Cave is a production I presented at Syntax 2011.

It uses the same "Demo Construction Kit" I made for wtf-atabimp, with the addition of a simple voxel engine and a clean up of the mp3 playing code. All voxel operations (such as "adding" and "carving out" voxels) are done in constant time, with the "housekeeping" of the voxel render list occuring at render time.

This demo is built on a framework that allows the entire demo to be driven by lua. The lua files are included, and can be modified freely. There is also a console available from the demo itself, providing a "live coding" environment which permits complete modification of the demo while it is running. There is an unmarked pane splitter at the bottom of the window which can be moved to reveal the console. The console now maintains a persistent session, so the command history is maintained between runs.

Thanks to cTrix for his wizardry in creating the awesome music for the demo!

Download

Enjoy!

[Kirl]

Fantastic demo and it runs really smooth on my laptop!

Excellent work! 

[fugue]

Thank you!

I haven't bought new hardware in years, so I code and run my demos on a laptop that uses nothing fancier than an intel graphics chipset. It seems to be more than enough for the sorts of universes I like to create.

[benny!]

Hey Fugue,

that's a cool minecraft-like demo. Runs really smooth on my crappy laptop here, too! Good work.

Reading about the system behind it makes it even more cooler.

Keep up the good work!

Best,
benny!

[LittleWhite]

I saw your demo yesterday.

(Friends (who does not know the demoscene) said: "It making the eyes crying and bleeding")
So what I have to say, because it's not so false, it to try to generate colours in a different (why not in a Minecraft style, with texture and minerals veins))

Otherwise the demo is impressive and I should try to use your console.
Do you plan to port it on Linux ?

Did you use spatial partionning to render only the quads needed ? (with frustrum culling). I guess you are forced too do so

[fugue]

I don't want to defend the colour scheme. It was a colour scheme I put in initially to ensure that adjacent cubes have contrasting colours.

The engine only renders the quads that are "exposed to the air". When a cube is "carved out", it is marked as deleted and adjacent cubes are added to the render list (if they haven't been marked as already in the list) and the appropriate quad of these cubes is switched on. At render time, as the render list is traversed, cubes marked as deleted are routed around to drop them from the list.

There might be some fun getting the colours to do funky things in the cave, or having some surprising subterranean features uncovered as the cave is dug.

I wrote it using the Qt API, so it should readily port to linux. I will post teh codez shortly.

[fugue]

benny!: Your comment made my day. Thanks!!

[LittleWhite]

Oh nice to hear that the code is made using Qt
If you don't want to change the colours, just add lighting, it does a lot
(if it is possible in the console, I will try ... but it also means to avoid the normals)

[benny!]

benny!: Your comment made my day. Thanks!!

hehe ... you're welcome ;-)

[Shockwave]

Hi Fugue,

I found it really interesting to see your cave demo and how it follows on from your introductory post.  Thanks a lot for posting it, the colours are definitely Dutch but it runs really nicely and I think that is the point of this - to demonstrate what your engine can do.

Have some good karma and I'll look forward to seeing what else you can make from it

[Raizor]

Interesting demo Fugue. I checked some of your other stuff on Pouet out too, very nice