Hello,

I'm new here so I hope I didn't post it on the wrong subforum.

Well, I'm posting here because I've an question. A friend and I are making a game that's using OpenGL 1 and C++.

The most significant part may be the voxel engine. That's my problem. I've no Idea that seems to be good.

Ideas:

1) Generating Colored Perlin Noise maps for each layer and load map from this file

2) Using the random-function provided by the Windows OS and generating map by these random values.

Is there a good way that YOU would recommend?

So, well, I hope you've some better ideas for me that could help us to manage this

Thanks Techie

EDIT: We're not / won't be using STL!

EDIT: We're not / won't be using STL!

I'm no C++ coder but not using the standard libraries provided by the development tools seems a bad idea.

EDIT: We're not / won't be using STL!

If you want to use only OpenGL 1, you'll end up with a ... 1995 looking game... well

Few, pre-shader games of yesterday:

Quality Art Assets (if you can afford them) can go a really long way even on old tech...

I knock on Minecraft all the time, but, to be fair a voxel based game world would have much different technical constraints than the average FPS like unreal.

I couldn't disagree more.

You -clearly- have not experienced the technology shock from running the Unreal 1 for the very first time on your machine. Or you weren't really a strong gamer, so you might not really care at that time.

The technology Wow factor like that didn't happen more than 4-5 times in whole 3D gaming history. I'm pretty sure I did not experience a technology jump like that, since that time, due to the simple fact, that the difference in 3d effects for next games was merely incremental.

Not even shaders themselves brought such a wow factor. Not even Crysis (which was also just a relatively small difference to the then-next-best-looking game).

The performance and feature-set of Unreal1's SW rasterizer were absolutely mind-blowing. 3DFX renderer was certainly very nice an fast (but that was expected), but the SW rasterizer was something ucomparable to anything else on the market at that time and for a very long time after that.

I highly doubt you could have taken a game like unreal and make it like minecraft while still maintaining the same look on that hardware.

Uhm, no

Your gaming history must have clearly started way, way too late.

Ever played Commanche 1 ? You know, that first voxel helicopter simulator ? I played it on my AMD 386 DX 40 MHz in 1992. Fourty Megahertz.

I used to play lots of flight simulators back then and it took almost 10 times a faster HW (and 3D cards) to come up with comparably better visuals, taking into account the difference in performance. Yes, the voxel renderer was that much ahead.

If you ever had a chance to play the level, where they enabled water reflections for the first time and flew through some narrow canyons and then played the next-best-looking game of that times, it would be like Crysis vs Wolfenstein 1 (yes, the one which ran on 80286).

I clearly remember how years went past, and although the quality of polygon rasterizers have been steadilly rising, yet it took way too many years to surpass the voxel quality of Commanche.

Talking about voxels, do you recognize this ?