[Rendering] Terrain Engine

[michaelsakharov]

Terrain is gonna be an interesting topic for Prowl.

We want Voxel support however regular voxels can be quite expensive, and we also want regular Quadtree terrain for maximum performance.

The idea I'm thinking of now is a Regular quadtree terrain, But with a VoxelSystem that can complement it.
Kinda like Digger PRO for unity, but that can also work independently.

So Essentially two Independent systems but that can work seamlessly together.

Ideally, both systems are flexible and can be rotated/scaled and altered in all the ways you might expect.
It should be possible to do Planets for example with just the Quadtree, Just voxels, or both together.

For now, I think the voxel side should be more Scripting than In Editor, the Terrain will have support built-in you can toggle on.

[PaperPrototype]

What about transvoxel? If you use purely an Octree then you could apply "height" based edits like a normal Quadtree terrain, but then seamlessly add caves, overhangs etc

[michaelsakharov]

Yes but at a significant cost to performance.
Octree LOD is significantly more expensive than quadtree, and transvoxel is even more costly than just height on a plane.
We need something blazing fast by default, that can run on a mobile phone without many hiccups.

The completed terrain engine probably will allow for overhangs and caves, just not through having the entire terrain be voxels, but instead, a hybrid, where everything is quadtree until you edit an area, upon which that area turns to voxel chunks.
Though it probably won't be transvoxel and instead just regular marching cubes.

[PaperPrototype]

Alright, makes sense. In that case I'm gonna try and get heightmap terrain working in Prowl as a test.

[Shadowblitz16]

Please don't force transvoxel, it would be nice to have cubic voxels.

I always thought it would be cool to have a 1/16 unit sized voxel engine with support for sloping and curves simular to how dual universe has it. starbound is 2d but kinda the same art style where in starbound's case there is tiles and furniture that has slopes and curves to it.

in starbounds case slopes don't nullify strait tiles. you only get slopes on sloped tiles if they are diagnal from each other, two tiles strait from each other still form a flat edge