Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas. Discusses Procedural Terrain, Vegetation and Architecture generation. Also OpenCL, Voxels and Computer Graphics in general.
Here are some very exciting news at least for me. A few months ago CodeHatch, the company behind Starforge, licensed the VoxelFarm engine. They are using it from Unity in this latest video showing their new game terrain:
These guys are crazy-talented. Moreover, they are the nicest, most positive people I have ever encountered and worked with. Maybe it is because they are Canadians, who knows.
My heart is with Starforge, I really hope great things come to this project. If you have not checked this game out, it is on Steam.
It seems they put their tech to good use. Their island demo was very nice, and now this is one of the best point cloud visualization I have seen so far. Is it groundbreaking or revolutionary? No. There is plenty of this going around. But this is good stuff.
This announcement may be very disappointing to some people who may have taken their past claims literally. Two years ago they said they had made computer game graphics 100,000 better. They would show you screenshots from Crysis and explain how bad all this was compared to their new thing. Panties were thrown all over the internet.
The reality is today this still ranks below the latest iterations of CryEngine, Unreal Engine and id's Tech 5. It even ranks below previous versions of those engines. Actually I do not think you can make a game with this at all. If you want to have the texture density you have on screen in most games, you would need to store far more information than what they have in the demos shown here. It is a perfect match for the state of laser scanning, where you do not have much detail to begin with. They are not showing grains of dirt anymore, that is for sure.
The real improvement in the last two years? The hype levels are a lot lower.
