Sunday, May 6, 2012

Neat Level Builder for Unity 3d




I am not much of a gamer but I found this neat little Voxel mining program for Unity 3D'ers. Unity 3d continues to grow by leaps and bounds in the game developer world. You can find out more HERE. More and more I am coming across little utilities that make Unity 3D even more powerful for the development of games.

Videos always help. HERE

Voxelform 2.0 allows you to create unique levels by mining your way through rock and other materials. It's kind of a 3d Dig Dug (am I dating myself) except your creating game levels.






The results of your voxel mining can create intriguingly complex player levels. There's much more to it than that, but I like the interactivity of mining.









 Here's a swoonful feature set:

Feature set keeps growing.

  • Designed to be a flexible, customizable, part of your project.
  • New: Includes two demo scenes: A simple run-time editor demo, and a simple FPS controller game demo.
  • Heavily documented source with XML code docs for tool tip support.
  • Marching Cubes algorithm at the core, provides efficient dynamic organic terrain.
  • Sculpt the terrain on the fly, any way you see fit.
  • Easy access to voxel data, and easily scripted externally.
  • New: Voxel data source is fully customizable via an interface.
  • New: Voxel structure with "factory settings" includes support for volume, material index, and neighbor info.
  • New: Use voxel type information for multi-material support with material palettes.
  • New: Material palettes (for use with voxel terrain) support a theoretical maximum of 65,536 Unity Materials.
  • New: Hidden regions within multi-material welds are culled before Marching Cubes processes them.
  • Chunk based design.
  • Flexible voxel chunk sizes.
  • Chunks can be any shape or size.
  • Create as many chunks as you can safely fit into memory.  Note: Mono has a limit.
  • No wait time for initial building of the chunks. Chunks load in, and away from you as you play.
  • New: Single frame loading allows the entire voxel terrain to be loaded on the first frame, but incurs a delay.
  • Chunks past a certain distance become disabled, and then re-enabled as the observer moves.
  • A queuing system keeps chunk processing well balanced over multiple frames.
  • All background tasks are successfully load balanced on the main thread.
  • Your clients will not need a multi-core processor to run your game.
  • New: 15 built-in volumetric shaders with built-in material examples for each will save you time.
  • New: Built-in shaders provide diffuse, normal, and specular mapping for triplanar texturing.
  • Easily simulate granite, marble, regular stone, stratification, and more, or roll your own shaders.
  • Built-in methods for saving, and loading raw terrain data.
  • Built-in methods for Improved Perlin, and Simplex Noise to create fractal geometry.
  • Solid (volumetric) texturing.
  • Solid fractal texturing.
  • Triplanar texturing.
  • New: Complete code overhaul with improved flexibility, and additional helper methods.
  • New: Editor menu items for saving, loading, creating, and editing voxel terrain.
  • New: Experimental (beta) voxel terrain editor (editor extension requiring Unity Pro) is included but not required.

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