So I’ve posted a new version of Oxel, grab it here. The new version has several improvements in UI, performance, stability, as well as a brand new re-triangulation library. The previous versions all used David Eberly’s implementation in Wild Magic. Oxel 1.1 uses the Poly2Tri library to retriangulate each surface and I’m much happier with the results.
So I have a new page dedicated to the Oxel project located here: http://nickdarnell.com/Oxel. I’ve also started a new project on BitBucket where you’ll be able to find future releases and the source code for Oxel, http://bitbucket.org/NickDarnell/oxel.
There is also a new 1.0.1 version of the tool that has been posted to the BitBucket page, http://bitbucket.org/NickDarnell/oxel/downloads.
Version 1.0.1 is mostly just a maintenance release, there were several usability issues that I needed a few more days to clean up.
Can’t wait to start getting some users and feedback :)
Its been awhile since I’ve done an update to my research into occluder generation. If you need a refresher, take a look at:
Lets start with the newest and most important information…
The project is now hosted on BitBucket, http://bitbucket.org/NickDarnell/oxel/overview feel free to contribute or just follow along :)
Oxel is a tool for generating occluders – primarily for use with the Hierarchical Z-Buffer method of occlusion culling. Open an .obj file then go to Build > Voxelize to generate the proxy. Try it out, let me know what you think.
There are some further improvements that have been made over the method that is laid out in the original Generating Occlusion Volumes post,
I went back to the CSG article Sander van Rossen and Matthew Baranowski wrote. I noticed near the end that they recommended retriangulating the final CSG mesh because their library doesn’t handle it.
The easiest method I found to do the retriangulation was to just use David Eberly’s Wild Magic math library which can do it, see here. Before you perform the retriangulation you need to collect all the external/internal edge loops on each surface and then merge collinear edges before performing the retriangulation.
It’s was definitely worth doing, performing the retriangulation saved about 30% of the triangles.
When you’re generating occluder geometry you need to ensure that the volumes you’re adding are useful enough to pay the additional polygon tax they will incur.
Oxel achieves this by measuring the number of pixels written to the color buffer by rendering the original visual mesh into the stencil buffer, and then using the stencil buffer to clip a full screen quad while a “samples passed” hardware query is performed to record the number of pixels written. This is performed from about 64 different camera angles – then when all the samples are summed together this defines the ground truth occlusion of the mesh.
Knowing that information we can evaluate every new box we plan to add to the final occlusion proxy geometry and ask – Does this increase the coverage enough to make it worth it?. The default threshold is set to 3%. If a new volume does not at least cover 3% of new silhouette pixels, we don’t include it in the final occluder mesh.
Not every game needs the occluders to be visible from all angles. For example most racing games will never have the cars jumping so high they see on top of a building. In those circumstances you may not want to have the occluders bothering to have polygons on the top.
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So the tool offers the ability to remove Top and Bottom polygons from the final occluder mesh after everything has finished being processed.
If you decide to filter out all top polygons they’re all removed. For bottom surfaces this has to be handled slightly differently, see below -
Imagine a bridge structure or a large over hang on a building. You wouldn’t want the bottom portion of the occluder to be removed from the overhang since it would allow seeing into and through the occluder – because presumably you wouldn’t have double sided rendering enabled. So to distinguish between bottom surfaces not meant to ever be seen by the player, and bottom surfaces that may be important to higher up potions of the structure, only bottom surfaces within 1 voxel’s height from the base of the mesh are removed. (See picture above)
I’ve got some more ideas I need to test out but I wanted to go ahead and cut a version of where I’m at and let others take a look and give me some feedback.
One area I need to investigate next is a better way to generate the boxes. Currently they are just expanded in all directions equally, but that’s not ideal. I’m thinking about trying a parallel brute force method that would test all possible boxes at a specific origin point to find the best shaped box to generate from that point.
The 2012 Global Game Jam is over and it was another year of awesome games in the Raleigh-Durham – North Carolina area. This week I wanted to put the spotlight on all the games lovingly crafted by our crack squad of jammers – especially mine, Low Power! :D
The Ouroboros – but no explanation was given. We just showed the jammers the image and it was up to them to interprete it.
Rock, Paper, Scissors with body snatching!
Avoid or possess enemies to stay alive and win.
In order to survive Low Power you must consume yourself (like the Ouroboros) to survive. You control a robot whose battery is constantly draining but there are valuable energy cores scattered throughout the level that will sustain your life. There are all kinds of dangerous environmental hazards that unless you enable your sensors/abilities (lights, shield, ground sensor, microphone) you’ll never survive. However enabling the different systems will drain your battery even faster!
You are a Parasite that leeches off battle ships. Enemies will constantly come in formations to destroy the ship you are occupying. Using the possessed ship, you must defeat your enemies! However, as you leech your ship it slowly dies, you will constantly need to take control of and leech of another ship. With out a ship for protection you are helpless!
A rift in spacetime has resulted in a large number of World War II era planes getting stuck on the world snake. Join the frequent fliers club of Ouroboros Airlines, racking up points while taking advantage of the torus nature of your new environment.
Control “Hardy the Hoop Snake, Jr., III, IV, and V” in his quest to eat as many chili dogs as possible while winding through ‘Catastrophe Canyon’
You are the snake’s guardian, you must ensure that balance is maintained. Let enough creatures be eaten by the snake to ensure he doesn’t starve, but not enough that he frenzies and destroys everything. All the while outrunning him!
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately rebuilding the old Triangle Game Jam website. Now that it’s done I can get back to new articles. The new site is up at http://www.trianglegamejam.com. It’s where we’ll be archiving all Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill – Global and Triangle game jams. All the past years works that I could get my hands on are up there and worth taking a look at. It’s amazing what people with a goal can create in a weekend.
In other news – The global game jam starts this Friday (January 27th). You should signup and find a local jam site you can attend. It’s totally worth a weekend of your time.
