Voxel Mesh Hybrids: A Walkthrough

Six more weeks have passed since I first posted about Adaptive Volumetric Meshes, which have since turned into Voxel Mesh Hybrids after some refinements for the sake of simplicity and ease of use. It's the driving tech behind the procedural and player-authored meshing that our game in production, NOWHERE (alpha available for download), requires.

After the recent refinements, it's time for another short write-up, as the work has reached a stable state and is nearly ripe for release as part of the next Alpha later this month. Beware: from here on it gets technical.

NOWHERE - News From The Business End

Aside from all the hardcore video game making going on, a bunch of super exciting business related events happened during the last few weeks as well. Enough reason to post a summary. Hold on to your seats.

March 4th: Thanks to everyone involved (which most likely includes you), NOWHERE has been greenlit on Steam. That means our greatest hurdle to a Steam release has been overcome. All existing and future buyers of the game will be able to redeem their Steam keys after launch. NOWHERE is scheduled to launch April 15th 2014 (Update: Steam launch and new alpha delayed, new alpha scheduled for June 10th!) in the Early Access category, along with a new alpha build and an accompanying trailer. Until then, you can follow new updates on NOWHERE’s Steam Greenlight page. A huge thank you to everyone who voted for us and supported us, you are amazing and the reason we got this far.

March 17th: All founders registered for access to the Founders Lounge at the Nowherian forum can now download all previously released alphas from its Release Archive, thanks to the tireless work of forum administrator Frame. If you are a founder, you are eligible for the Founders Lounge! To add founder status to your forum account, just send us an email to support-at-duangle-dot-com and mention your forum username and purchase email address. If you bought the game via Humble Store please send us a screenshot of the purchase or forward the purchase confirmation mail. I'll process every request as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience!

March 23th: A few founders asked if it were possible to support the development of NOWHERE on a monthly basis, so we created a Patreon site. You can also pledge smaller amounts monthly to get a copy of Nowhere. Patrons pledging at least $21 will be listed in the Patreon section in the game's credits (ranked by contribution).

  March 24th: Nowhere has been launched on the official Humble Store. Please note that due to technical reasons these sales go into another bucket; the full list of reward tiers can only be purchased on our site.

  March 30th: 1.000 founders (currently 1.042) have bought and supported NOWHERE. THAT IS SERIOUSLY TOTALLY NUTS YOU GUYS.

March 31th: We visited Rezzed this weekend, listened to great dev talks and met a bunch of great people. Although videogamesing is awesome, It’s good to leave the cave and do something different from time to time. Birmingham was lovely. What in the world beats vintage cheddar? Nothing. Not even our game.

April 1st: We’re thrilled to report that Duangle got acquired by Mountain Dew for a round $2 billion sum and is renamed to Dewangle. All Nowherian bodies will be branded with appropriate new corporate identity. An exciting synergy only for people who have no idea what’s been going on lately!

April 2nd: Duncan Harris, curator and creator of the lovely website Dead End Thrills published a long interview with Leonard and me in his Rock Paper Shotgun column. Check it out!

  April 11th, 2014: The distant future. Nowhere will be playable at PAX, at the “Joyful Bewilderment” installation organized by BigSushi.fm starting April 11th between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. in Boston, MA, USA. We’re not sure yet, but either Alpha 75 or Alpha 91 will be shown.

New Tech Unlocked: Adaptive Volumetric Meshes

This week I reached a major milestone in my implementation of the new general meshing tech for our game in production, NOWHERE (alpha available for download), which is going to replace the previous implementation we used for sculpting and will do a better job at covering the different procedural modelling approaches the game requires. To commemorate the occasion, I did a little write-up. Beware: from here on it gets quite technical. I interspersed the article with a few screenshots from the work on the prototype. These are not screenshots of the game.

Vote for NOWHERE on Steam Greenlight!

Although Valve has announced recently that they would rather switch Greenlight for something else, we still haven't really done something with it, although we paid the $90 admission fee a long time ago. So we figured, what the heck, let's try it. If you have nothing better to do right now, why not head over to Greenlight to give us a big smackin' YES? It will be totally worth it your time, and we may actually end up on Steam, which greatly helps our ever diminishing funding treasury.

TO THE VOTE MOBILE, ROBIN

NOWHERE - Alpha 91 - Sailing

About three months have passed since the release of Alpha 75, and it's about time for an update. This video walks you through the changes in Alpha 91 of NOWHERE, which you can download right away from your Humble Store account, if you have backed the game or are about to do so.

Windows, Linux and Mac OS X builds are online.

Changes:
- NEW: The readme.txt has been updated to reflect latest changes. Check it out.
- NEW: Procedural terrain! Alpha 91 demonstrates the earliest incarnation of the kind of landscapes you can expect to see in NOWHERE. After a short one time seeding, the game starts off with three Nowherian shells, which are uniquely grown for every game; All shells are depictions of the same Nowherian at different stages of his life. The smallest shell has an age comparable to the human age of 10. The second shell is about 20 years old, while the third shell is about 60 years of age, and has an average diameter of 600 to 800 meters. While these bodies are still just gracefully rotating shells, in the finished game, Nowherians will live within and around each other, functioning both as agents with artificial intelligence and housings to other agents.
- NEW: Instead of a propulsion system that would get you precisely where you would like to go, you are now equipped with a much more energy efficient tether, which works as a mixture of a rope and an anchor, or some kind of electromagnetic umbilical cord.
- NEW: Previous alphas have been using the Bullet physics system, which was difficult to control from Python, badly documented and therefore hard to tune right. The library has been replaced with the OpenDynamics Engine, which, while not as excessively featured, is more accessible, well documented, exposes better treatment of hard collisions and, most importantly, is fun to use.
- NEW: A completely overhauled rendering system. The engine now uses deferred high dynamic range rendering and lighting, normal mapping, cascaded exponential variant shadow maps, screen-space ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field rendering and wide bloom to improve color fidelity, surface plasticity and depth perception. These improvements help players greatly with navigating an abstract environment, and establish the basic system requirements of the game. They also help us to maintain a basic visual quality level even when models and textures are still placeholders.
- NEW: Video quality can be controlled with the command-line switch --video-quality and provides seven different presets to balance presentation for performance. Check out the readme.txt for more information.

Known problems are listed in the supplied readme.txt.

Up Ahead:
- Populate the colony with Nowherians.

NOWHERE - Let's Make It Happen!

This is the day. The day that our love child NOWHERE goes into official crowdfunding to allow us to work full time on the game that we always wanted to play.

The NOWHERE site has been completely rebooted and now features the concept trailer that we have put everything into within the past week. Until now I was very hesitant to give the big picture away, but as we depend on your support, this is the last ace that I had in my sleeve.

Much love also goes out to the great folks from Humble Store who are shouldering the payment process for us. Buying NOWHERE will now add the alpha to your existing humble account. If you already have an account with us, you'll still receive new Alphas this way, with an option to migrate NOWHERE to your Humble account if you like, and the ability to upgrade your tier.

We hope that you'll love what we're doing and ask you to tell everyone you know about NOWHERE. The internet is a noisy place, so let's be the loudest, if only for half an hour. Our success is your success.

NOWHERE - Alpha 75 - Sculpt

We've been taking our sweet time, but here it is, finally, Alpha 75, with a dozen new features, available for everyone who is alphafunding the game (have you seen our new site yet? Tell everyone!). As usual, you'll find the new download on your account page.

Changes:
- NEW: The readme.txt has been extended with new information and quickstart guide. Check it out.
- NEW: Sculpting/terrain engine! Meshes in the game can now be sculpted and procedurally deformed freely. This tech is the foundation for everything we are going to do with growing avatars and landscapes in the next alphas.
- NEW: Oculus Rift support! For Windows, there's a batchfile supplied to start up the game with the right parameters. For other platforms, the command-line options --3d or and --fullscreen will lead you to success. Use --videomode list to find the OVR display and pick a videomode  (e.g. --videomode 1.1) that matches a 1280x800x60 resolution.
- NEW: HDR rendering. The retained rendering engine has been rewritten, and the game is now rendered with HDR quality and filmic tonemapping. The bloom shader has been improved to allow for really high blooms. As a result, colors look way more vibrant now and artifacts have been greatly reduced.
- NEW: Procedural music effects. The magnificent Sunvox library (which replaces the more low-level libpd) provides realtime synthesized music and dsp effects that the game modulates based on events that happen in the game. Eventually, all sounds in the world will be represented by musical elements, and entire passages of the music will be procedurally generated in the game world.
- NEW: A "Third-Eye" system that projects augmented reality into your game world; currently it generates coordinate points and shows you the currently selected tool, but it will eventually be somewhat of an internet in 3D, projecting the "thinking world" of Nowherians to allow them to communicate.
- NEW: A very rudimentary cosmic bubble. It's currently only 100 meters across, but will grow as performance and features of the game improve. The light blue "noodles" growing from the sides are a first primitive rendition of what are eventually going to become plasma rivers, which provide the raw energy that Nowherians require to live.
- NEW: The menu has a quickhelp for keyboard and gamepad controls.
- FIX: XBOX 360 Gamepad support has been fixed for Windows.

Known problems are listed in the supplied readme.txt.

Up Ahead:
- Flesh out the colony in which the sentients will be living and create places where there's something to do.
- Drive the backstory forward and rearrange the gameplay around our new terrain techniques, starting with populating our space with the sentient swarm AI. The sentients are not hostile, but they inhabit the world, and interaction with them is a key element of the gameplay.