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Author Topic: Look at Atomontage Engine  (Read 12775 times)

sniperwolfpk5

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Look at Atomontage Engine
« on: July 19, 2011, 06:54:29 am »

I have seen this engine yesterday and i want to share it with you people.

Atomontage engine is a thin game engine that provides basic data management functionality combined with a modern physics simulation and a vector and voxel content rendering capability.

http://www.atomontage.com


Sorry if the topic is already been posted.
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datslok

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Look at Atomontage Engine
« Reply #1 on: July 19, 2011, 09:02:23 am »

Thats amazingly cool! maybe some sort off atom physics like this can be implemented in Outerra :D or this can be some sort of plugin :P
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SpaceFlight

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« Reply #2 on: July 19, 2011, 09:57:25 am »

Here is the other thread about this engine:

http://www.outerra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=292

I think the Delta Force games from Novalogic used a voxel engine and Crysis uses partly voxels, for its terrain system as far as I know.

A couple of questions to Cameni:
I read somewhere that one of the advantages of voxels over polygons lies in the creation of terrain and landscapes, is that true?
Are there other advantages/disadvantages?
Also, is a voxel based planetary engine possible and do voxel engines have "better" physics?
Additionally, can a voxel based physics system be integrated within a polygon based engine?
Last but not least: Your engine uses polygons, right?

I hope some of these questions make sense and are not too general in nature to be answered here.

SF
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necro

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Look at Atomontage Engine
« Reply #3 on: July 19, 2011, 10:39:14 am »

i'm not cameni and so i will just answer with my comprehension. You are right. Big terrain could benefit from voxeling, but not in this way like the threadstarter meant it. With voxeling your scene-data you will get a kind of object-tree (voxel-object-tree) which inherits his visibility to his children-voxels, which are smaller and they would  have the shape of the fathervoxel if you would sum up them together .

So for easy understanding you could imagine a mountain. This mountain is part of maybe 3 big voxels. They are visible if your camera directs to that mountain. Each Voxel has child-voxels, which are also visible, because her father-voxel is visible. The visibility depends on the distance to the lookAt-point and if the father-voxel is visible. Of course you do not have to draw each child-voxel, so you can stop the iterating-processing depending on the distance and size of the voxel.

So voxeling is renderpipelinefriendly, because you do not have to care about these ones, which are not visible, and also their children-voxels. Is like a binary-tree-search, but not really binary ^^

So voxeling could mean two things. The engine above is using them both.
1) - distribute object-data in a voxel-tree
2) - render them as cubes, its like minecraft but with more detail (could be infinite small theoretically)

Actually i dislike the second feature, because the objects will look like minecraft-stuff with a bigger resolution. So i think just the first thing could be interesting for outerra. But i think also, that cameni is using a smart octree for optimizing the rendering-process (getting the objectdata for the renderpipeline). Outerra is polygonebased, yah.

Does they have better physics? Maybe you saw some videos of the engine above. They can draw exact footprints in the sand. But i think, you will not gain better physics with them. They will not be a difference to common models. The armature decides the physic-capabilities.

I hope that i didnt confused you too much, and maybe i'm wrong with my thoughts. Feel free to correct me ;)
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SpaceFlight

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« Reply #4 on: July 19, 2011, 12:31:11 pm »

Thanks necro.
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ZeosPantera

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« Reply #5 on: July 19, 2011, 01:55:07 pm »

I like it.



But in the mean time.. Notch is making minecraft 512 height..

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo... The technology is mind boggling.



I swear sometimes I think communism had it right.
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cameni

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Look at Atomontage Engine
« Reply #6 on: July 19, 2011, 02:53:23 pm »

Necro explained some of it pretty well already.

Quote from: SpaceFlight
A couple of questions to Cameni:
I read somewhere that one of the advantages of voxels over polygons lies in the creation of terrain and landscapes, is that true?
Are there other advantages/disadvantages?
The first assertion is a bit vague, so let me explain the differences first.
Polygonal terrain approaches the problem by composing a visible surface of the terrain, i.e. the physical representation that is being kept and rendered is of the terrain surface. Voxels basically encode the terrain volume itself.

Some of the differences are obvious: when I dig a hole in a voxel terrain, the volume gets physically (re)moved, unlike in the polygonal terrain, where I'm actually deforming a surface. Additional restriction comes from the fact that in polygonal engines the land surfaces are usually encoded as heightfields - a regular grid of heights, in order to save memory and enable some optimizations. This means that the hole would have to be vertical if it meant to use solely the heightfield functionality. Of course, you can use a different geometry generator for caves and tunnels, as we plan to.

You may wonder why we would bother with a polygonal engine when the voxels sound so superior. So, obviously, there's a catch :)
[list=*]
  • Representing world as voxels is extremely heavy on the memory and disk space, especially if you want to utilize the terrain deformation/destruction advantage[/*]
  • You need to solve how to effectively render the volumetric data, reducing the huge amount of data flowing to graphics card[/*]
With voxel approach you are trading the ease of manipulation of terrain (world) data, for reduced efficiency and elevated storage requirements. If one means to generate an arbitrary terrain, then yes, voxels provide an advantage, but for a price.

Quote
Also, is a voxel based planetary engine possible and do voxel engines have "better" physics?
Additionally, can a voxel based physics system be integrated within a polygon based engine?

While in theory you could have a complete voxel planet, the short, practical answer is no, you can't :)
The thing is, voxels are still not very practical even for constrained game levels because of the requirements, and using it for whole planets would be many times more demanding. In theory you could do what Minecraft does, but since it should be a sphere, you won't have it aligned on all sides and thus even such coarse world with 1x1 meter voxels won't be usable for a planet. Going to finer representations is not feasible because of rapidly rising resource consumption.

Besides, it all expects that the world is dynamically generated by fractals. If you'd like a voxel world that uses real data, that would require even heavier processing, though I can foresee some techniques that could be used to combine it.

As for the physics, what you are probably referring to is again the dynamic terrain deformation. I'd say that with voxels doing this side of physical effects is much easier, it's basically the first thing any voxelist will show you because it's really easy while on polygonal terrain it's not trivial. But it doesn't balance out the disadvantages of voxels elsewhere, in my opinion.

Combining the two .. I don't have an idea how, at the moment. Maybe for some localized patches there could be a voxel space embedded, but that would effectively mean developing two engines anyway.
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SpaceFlight

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« Reply #7 on: July 19, 2011, 03:45:23 pm »

Thanks alot Cameni for the answers, much appreciated.
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Jagerbomber

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« Reply #8 on: July 19, 2011, 11:24:26 pm »

Quote from: ZeosPantera
But in the mean time.. Notch is making minecraft 512 height..

Well, actually he's making it easier to mod to make a map of that height.  Default is staying the way it already is.
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ZeosPantera

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« Reply #9 on: July 20, 2011, 01:02:20 am »

Quote from: Jagerbomber
Quote from: ZeosPantera
But in the mean time.. Notch is making minecraft 512 height..

Well, actually he's making it easier to mod to make a map of that height.  Default is staying the way it already is.

fail. I'll wait for outerra then. I heard its going to be 2.2 billion blocks high. If each block were a kilometer. And those kilometers were filled with awesome smooth texture and bumpmapping. Yeah I'll wait.
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