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Caliane

Caliane

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EverQuest Next - Developer Diary #3: Landmark Resources

"Liquids:
Some things are pretty much everywhere, like mud and water, while others like ice and snow - though common - require travel to the Tundra! Additional higher tier liquids include tar, oil, and lava."


need to go review vids and see if we can see what water looked like. Did the earlier videos with the fighting on the bridge give us a glimpse of water?


That lava is pretty solid looking.
 
G

gogojira_sl

shitlord
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Never saw anything with liquids. Check a couple pages back, there were a few liquid videos with voxels but it looked janky as fuck. It wasn't EQN footage, to be clear.
 
Skanda

Skanda

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Returning from a google search and I still don't really see the problem

Cubeworld is a voxel based game with procedurally generated terrain which also features water. 3D dot game Heroes is another voxel game with water.

Additionally I see a number of youtube videos, some a few years old, showing off liquids in a voxel enviroment

I'm not sure why we're so iffy about water in SoE's engine and was wondering if there's been something said officially because I know how this board loves to run with rumors.
 
Skanda

Skanda

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Okay, the best evidence I can find for no liquid is from the voxel engine SoE licensed for EQN/L

http://voxelfarm.com/vfweb/blog.html
It seem he just started playing with water a couple of week ago, read his latest blog post where he describes water being a late development as "not because I consider it particularly difficult... I had a different reason."

So it does seem that the engine is only just now getting water addedalthoughSoE could have easily modified the engine themselves, license allowing.
 
M

Mur_sl

shitlord
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"Liquids:
Some things are pretty much everywhere, like mud and water, while others like ice and snow - though common - require travel to the Tundra! Additional higher tier liquids include tar, oil, and lava."

Maybe the problem isn't with Voxels, but with how they define liquids. Ice and Snow are now liquids?
 
Mr Creed

Mr Creed

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I think "water not yet in, tech hurdles" is from SOE live? I never took it as 'we wont have water' but more as 'the napkin with our plans for water environments is not finished'. Planetside 2 doesnt really feature water either now that I think of it, except as map borders. Although they picked the right environments to cover it up (a frozen continent, an arid desert/mountains continent, and akinda-lush boring continent nobody visits so they cant miss the rivers).
 
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Iadien

Silver Knight of the Realm
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I haven't heard them discuss water much, I did find an interview from gamescom, where Georgeson briefly mentions water.

water talk starts at 1:31:40 -GameOverCast - Episode 157

I really can't talk about it yet, because there are certain aspects of that system that we're still developing.
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Mr Creed_sl said:
I think "water not yet in, tech hurdles" is from SOE live? I never took it as 'we wont have water' but more as 'the napkin with our plans for water environments is not finished'. Planetside 2 doesnt really feature water either now that I think of it, except as map borders. Although they picked the right environments to cover it up (a frozen continent, an arid desert/mountains continent, and akinda-lush boring continent nobody visits so they cant miss the rivers).
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I believe this is correct, as I remember hearing this from SOE Live as well.
 
2

2002User

Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Water isn't in yet because Forgelight is fucking shit and so is SOE. One of the PS2 designers said they couldn't even cut terrain into the ground or make doors in PlanetSide 2.

Have we seen doors yet?
 
Dandai

Dandai

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<Gold Donor>
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Hopefully someone that actually knows what they're talking about can assist me here, but the reason water is trickier with voxels (as far as I understand it) is because voxels aren't your typical 3D objects rendered by a video card. They're actually static objects that are data points displayed as 3D pictures - notrendered. The distinction is important because when a video card has to render a 3D object it takes a bit of processing power. This is not true with voxels because, as mentioned before, they're just connected data points represented by pictures. There's almost no rendering involved so (with modern PCs) you can have literally infinite voxels on screen and experience no video lag.

Traditional 3D Objects:

  • Movable, fully animatable
  • More detailed = more rendering required.
  • Lots of fancy, detailed 3D objects on screen = video lag.

Voxels:
  • Immobile, no animations
  • More detailed = no problem
  • Infinite voxels on screen = no video lag

"But wait? Numerous videos have shown voxels being used to show destruction and chunks blowing off of walls/buildings/terrain."

You're right. That's because (again, as far as I understand it and I only stayed a Holiday Inn Express last night) voxels are connected data points rendered as pictures, and once those voxels receive the appropriate input they are replaced with traditional 3D objects that fully animate the destruction. EQNext is a combination of voxels and traditional 3D rendering (you can tell because the character models are most definitely not voxels).

So, finally, why does that make water tricky? Iassumeit's because you have to come up with a solution for setting huge areas of the game world as a certain 3D object (non-voxel) without taking a performance hit rendering it like you would a 3D character model. You can't comprise the water of voxels because they're static. They don't move. Even if you just simply turned off player clipping through the water voxels, I can't think of a way to simulate swimming through them. You'd just fall to the next set of voxels that had clipping.

Anyway, don't take that as the 100% god's honest truth because it's just my understanding of the tech after a few minutes of looking around to try to understand how it works.
 
Daidraco

Daidraco

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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"Liquids:
Some things are pretty much everywhere, like mud and water, while others like ice and snow - though common - require travel to the Tundra! Additional higher tier liquids include tar, oil, and lava."

Im just looking at it as they havent yet set the defined variables for how they want the environment to react to certain elements. For example, Snow and Ice were included on that list because of how they may react to abilities. Such as Frost abilities turning Water, Tar, Lava into solid elements such as Ice and Snow. Where as Ice and Snow are going to produce Water if hit with Fire Abilities. Producing the animations for how each of these reacts to each other and all variable combinations may just be a big hassle. Nothing "hard" about it. Just a big time investment of pure work. Steam, Lava, Water, Ice, Snow, Tar, Frozen Tar, Fossilized Tar, Dirt, etc. etc. The list just goes on and on for how each element is going to react to another element. If three elements come together? Four? All at once isnt likely to happen but what animation is used and the voxels let off afterwards?
 
Fedor

Fedor

<Banned>
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Twitter / DaveGeorgeson: 11 11 11 11

some fag_sl said:
11 11 11 11
wink.png
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Bruman

Bruman

Golden Squire
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Tol_sl said:
Does anyone really enjoy this sort of cryptic teasing?
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No, they don't, at least I don't think so. I think EQN was just jealous that Wildstar did a cryptic thing to announce hoverboards, which looked cooler than parkour movement, so this is his response. I doubt it has anything to do with anything.

And you know who loved Vaguebooking? Hitler.
 
D

Dahlrek_sl

shitlord
24
0
Dandai_sl said:
..voxals..
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Roughly speaking, voxels are the 3D equivalent of pixels, like a cube is the 3D equivalent of a square. Nothing more. People make voxel-based engines because it allows for a lot of useful simplifications - bounding box calculations are trivial, collision is easier, it's much more plausible to arbitrarily modify the content if your data model supports it, LoD calculations may be easier, etc. Some of those useful simplifications impose limitations (beside the obvious "everything is cubes" limitation). On the other hand, if your engine isn't terrible, many of the limitations can be skirted or outright ignored. You can do variable-sized voxels. You can do voxels with physics. And so on. Basically a voxel engine is just an engine built on the assumption that most of the stuff, most of the time, is comprised of axis-aligned regularly-spaced simple objects, rather than a normal 3D engine dealing with mostly arbitrarily-aligned, arbitrarily-positioned complex objects.

Eventually you end up converting them to triangles for the graphics card to render, because that's what graphics cards understand, but voxels make deriving and simplifying that triangulation very easy, and voxel-based games generally stick to low-poly content (cubes), all of which graphics cards appreciate.
 
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