Over the years I do tend to get side tracked. This post is dedicated to some of these side paths I have taken.

There projects are all using Unity, but they also are possibly relevant to other engines as well.

Voxels, Cubes, Ramps, Multi-blocks

I often get distracted by the concept of voxels. I will dive into the idea of cubes mixed with more complex shapes. I began my journey when I discovered what I now consider a holy grail of minecraft style voxels using the Unity Engine.

If you have some time to kill this Mega Thread (going on for years) is worth exploring from start to finish (still going):

After Playing Minecraft - The First Post was October 8th, 2010 and the most recent at the time I write this is May 18th, 2016. This thread has been going on for almost six years. Some successful commercial projects were born within this thread.

For me I decided I wanted to tackle my own 3D Dwarf Fortress like game with some multiplayer aspects (lot's of people have thought this, in fact that is where Minecraft came from). My working title for this side distraction is CrazyBFS. This stands for Crazy Big Fantasy Simulator.

This is where I dove into voxels. I actually came up with what I considered a pretty good look and I was going to use it, but I am a stickler about optimization. The speed of zooming down through layers did not satisfy me, so I was constantly rewriting it rather than focusing on the game. This is a problem of mine. If I am not satisfied with something it is hard to convince me to release it anyway.

Here are some screenshots from CrazyBFS and I am starting newest to oldest so you can see some of the evolution of changes I made. These are all from quite a few years ago and were done in Unity. It has been optimized a lot, and I've learned a lot of new tricks so my original complaints for this may no longer be issues.

I then shelved that for awhile. Though I get sucked back into rebuilding Voxel engines quite often. I have some crazy ideas I think might be pretty cool with voxels.

A more recent working on replacing that design only had some initial functionality. I do have a few screenshots from that short diversion. This one uses normal maps, occlusion maps, etc. Though I never really leveraged that to give a full accounting for what could be done with it.

The nice thing here is that was all a single mesh, and I had intentionally rotated some boxes, built those stairs, some ramps, etc. I am sure I will revisit this again. I really enjoy the challenge of working with voxels.

Important thing to note. None of those screens are built using any form of prefab. For best performance with voxels you really need to build the meshes on the fly at runtime.

Tile Based, Rogue Like

So voxels were not meeting my performance needs. I decided I should use Creative Commons 0 art and build a huge atlas of sprites for a Rogue Like and at least prototype the game play elements. I also made some of it myself.

This went through several stages and I did run into a problem which I believe was a Unity DEFAULT issue I was unaware of at the time that could likely resolve the issues.

That is the crazy huge atlas I made for Rogue Likes only using my own art and CC0 art.

From this I moved onto making Isometric tiles so I could achieve a 2.5D effect.

That last one above is a performance test. It performed horribly. A ton of lag. These are 2D sprites (really planes) so you would expect them to perform way better than my voxels.

POSSIBLE FIX FOR THIS: By default Unity sprites are not planes. They attempt to trace the edge of the sprites for better collision detection. This means each sprite is likely considerably more than two triangles. You can fix this by going into ADVANCED on the texture and telling it you want it to treat sprites as RECTS. I did not know this when I did the above test so this might work well.

If any of you want to use my IsoTile Atlas in one of your projects, feel free... I announce it as CC0 right here and exclusively on steemit.com.

To show you what I mean here is a big voxel splat

I am getting over 1900 FPS with this screen!!! Way better than I was getting with those sprites.

The Project that is on hold

Here are various screenshots earliest to most recent from my NEXT project which is currently on hold while I finish up work on Wormhole Ventures since it was Greenlit.

These screenshots use my work and the work of my son @theanubisrider. It also uses an increasing collection of assets from the Unity Asset Store (often heavily modified by us).

All of these images are early prototypes we went quite a bit beyond this and replaced all of this before putting it on hold.

2nd version of the city. (this too will be replaced again and has already a couple of times)

Early work from @theanubisrider making some leather clothing.

All of those bottom teasers are from very old prototypes. I may blog with some more recent stuff soon.

Anyway, that is some of my distractions and messing with Unity and Game Development.