I did some experimenting with building presorted voxels.... which seem to apply pretty fast.

This was part of the C# work; but basically I made a linear list of the closest points of sectors that are to the [upper/0/lower][left/0/right][forward/0/backward]

I just went through each point(voxel) and figured it's distance from the respective point, and then sorted the resulting indexes; so I could have an ordered list of voxel indexes for transparent things that are outside of 'here' which is the 0/0/0 center point...

And really to be more accurate any sector that is on a 0 needs to be sorted based on the slice of other coordinates... blah I'm over-complicating this.

For 'here' the sort list has to be dynamically computed; there's too many combinations to keep them all pre-set; well maybe sub-sectors could be made that could be pieced back together as 'close enough' ...

so anyway then it's just foreach( index in list ) { mesh voxel[index] based on drawinfo }   instead of just voxel based on offset... this will then add the faces to the draw list in the right order... (and maybe that's kinda what your sorter does; I just kinda wanted to implement it, because when I tried it with a bunch of semi transparent blocks it broke down because of how it serially stepped - without regard to which side the player was from the sector being meshed.

Why don't I get notifications? I end up having to just come back and read? I'm pretty sure I put in my email right?

The purpose of actual "rendering sorter" in Blackvoxel is mainly to avoid too many texture changes. Some GPU shows important performance improvements with this.

Sorting "by distance" is only made on sector rendering level... but not for each voxel in the sector.

Sorting by distance for each face in the sector would be dependant of the player's point of view. But this would implies that the work could have to be redone (at least on some sectors) each time the player's point of view will change.

In Blackvoxel, "semi transparent" rendering like "tinted glass" is made on an extra separate rendering pass. As faces aren't sorted in a sector, this could end up to rendering transparent textures in the wrong order.
It's could be surprising... but that's not a problem. As long as the textures are sufficiently transparent... it's blending correctly in any order. Of course, there is a drawback : this won't work correctly with texures with too much (or very different levels of) opacity. Sorting faces would make it better for this case. It's a matter of choice between pro and cons.

I've checked for notifications, it's active on the forum and it's working ok : we get it ourself. Yes, you have filled an email address. Check your email in your profile and also the "spam folder" at your mailbox.

The Blackvoxel Team

Just an FYI, convention dictates Linux game data directories in the HOME folder should be prefixed with a "." to keep it hidden. This is to prevent viewing of the home folder being cluttered with generated folders.

Picture attached to demonstrate.

In the first version of Blackvoxel the data directory was hidden (we used ".blackvoxel") for the Linux version.

But that was changed when the school mode was introduced : we made the explicit choice to make this directory visible.

The problem with an hidden data directory was because Blackvoxel is also an educational program. Some users have to interact with some Blackvoxel files as part of their daily use(Programs for robots, files for programming or custom textures). Some student that are beginners can be confused as they didn't find the Blackvoxel data directory because it was hidden. And even for those knowing where to find it, it wasn't very comfortable as there is a lot of hidden directories in the home directory.
So it appears to us that a working directory shouldn't be hidden.
In addition, the new convention for a lot of Linux distribution is now to put config files in a directory lying in .config rather than sitting in the home as an hidden directory.

Some suggested that we should separate settings from the user data. But we find this confusing to have two place with Blackvoxel data in it. In addition, as all Blackvoxel settings aren't yet in the Gui, user have to use config files in some case. And it's not easy to explain to some users "find the Blackvoxel directory, not the one you see, but the other one that is hidden".

That said, we offer the possibility for the user (or some distribution packager) to adjust it to meet their goals. The data directory name is in the ACompileSettings.h configuration file for Blackvoxel compilation options.

The Blackvoxel Team

I have some updates and news

I've been working on WebVR; and 3d controller support.  I have a single sector loaded that I can walk around, and that's kinda satisfying.

I don't really have pictures... and it's somewhat unstable.   I can't use my glow shaader in AltSpace VR (Free Social platform which supports all devices including 2d displays; err your desktop. )

I have it loading there which is almost like WebVR... but entirely not.

still actually working out controls; and I noticed in AltSpace that the controls are still hooked to their game engine, and I need to see if there's a can't default behavior;

and I had to fallback to conventional textures; but 90fps in javascript with lots of room to spare

Hi d3x0r, glad to hear some news.

We have also worked on the idea of making a VR version at the Rift availability some time ago. Unfortunately, the VR universe was rather immature about different hardware support and standard API interfaces. But things will come in it's time.

About fps, what we can say as we have done a lot of tests with different machines, with voxel there could be huge difference between graphic cards,  operating systems and drivers. Some systems can get well over 1000fps on the blue flat area(with nVidia hardware). Some aren't really fast despite some powerfull hardware. Some hardware will struggle with unsorted textures. Some have limited capacity with shaders. Some drivers/platforms don't support some OpenGL features.

Ps : A new Blackvoxel version will get out soon... 

Got it. I will start development from scratch and release my work under MPLv2 
It will be exciting and I want try this

So, good luck for your project.

The Blackvoxel Team

We like very much the nice glowing effect caused by transparency 

About Javascript, if this environment is what meet at best the goals you want to reach, that's what matter.

Writing program always means doing choices. Whatever you choose these will always end up to be criticized

Of course, languages aren't same. Each have their particular pro and cons. But we know you are aware of that.

The Blackvoxel team.

Hi, and welcome to Blackvoxel.

Glad to see you enjoy Blackvoxel engine and it's universe style and mysterious ambience.

We are happy to see some creators to find interest in free software development.

Textures for the Blackvoxel engine are easy to do because of it's lighting model.

We would be very interested to follow your creation.

Good work

The Blackvoxel Team

Hi, I just downloaded this game and I'm really liking the concept of it. But alas, I have no clue at all what to do. I saw in a different forum post that someone received a very helpful "newbie" guide, and that's really great, but what I want is someone's opinion on whether or not this game is something for a casual player like myself. I know nothing of programming and the idea of switching between the game and the manual all the time is a little annoying but I can look past that. But is the game worth playing if I can't program any personal preferences into it?

Ps. I noticed there haven't been any recent posts on here. Is the game still in production? And thanks in advance for any help.

Hi Nemnadogg, welcome to the Blackvoxel Forum.

Yes, the game remains in production and there is no plan to stop.

Like most Free Sofware,  that's a long term project that (we hope) will have no stop and no end.

At this time, progress on development depend on our time, so that could go faster or slower.

Activity on the forum are usually higher when there is big updates and usually goes down in between.

About your question on a "newbie guide", a quick tutorial is here : http://forum.blackvoxel.com/index.php?topic=64.0

For programming, there is also the first lesson on our youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/user/Blackvoxel

About programming, it's not mandatory at all for playing Blackvoxel. This game can be played like any other adventure games. At this time, programming is only an option you can choose in term of game to see what programming can help you to achieve. That what is making Blackvoxel a good educational programming learning playground.

Yes we think Blackvoxel can be played by a casual player. But that could depend on what you like in games. Blackvoxel is an adventure and sandbox game where the goal is to explore this mysterious world, encounter very unknown things and situations and find how to deal with these. So the game will be suited for you if you like to take time to explore, discover... and build. And like in all games with total freedom, some of the goals are up to you...

What I can say to help you about the game goals are :

As you start with nothing, the goal of the game is to develop technology, tools, vehicles, means to explore the world and make things around you "more friendly" :

You'll have to build what we call a "tech tree" : collect resources to build tools. Use tools to build machines, use machines to make other machines. Use machines to make parts. Use parts to make vehicles, tools and machines.

The first goal should be to build some new constructor/destructor tools in order to dig faster and be able to collect some voxels that your "first tool" is unable to grab.

The second goal is to build some extraction robot to get mining operation automated. Achieving this need to master the metallurgy part of the game.

Ultimately, the ending of the "tiers 1" actual game is to build the airplane, takeoff and fly to discover the world.

The game universe is made of "zones" made of square rings around the central blue area you started on, each with it's own looking and dangers.

So one other goal of the game is to discover each of these zones and to get trough each to discover the next one. Very unknown things are to be expected...

Don't hesitate to ask if you have other questions about the game.

The Blackvoxel Team

Oh, that's nice...

Welcome to the Blackvoxel Forum, Karats 

We see you managed to understand how the Assembly robot is working without example.

Guess you already have some good knowledge about hardware to have made this...

Yes, examples about programming assembly robot are missing. We'll publish some examples to help understanding.

We'll give you also some though on your program to help improve it.

The Blackvoxel Team