But is this all "Boxes" like in minecraft?

Look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzmsCC6hetM&feature=related. Is this possible with polyvox with the feature of deformable terrain, like digging, explosion craters etc. ?

2. The q3 engine has a basic, but solid physic representation. its actualy not a physic engine, because it just gives some objects a physical touch, like bouncing grenades. Since polyvox is written in c++, an integration of bullet or newton should be easy. Is polyvox able to give a simplified representation of the voxels to an external physic engine? i mean, we dont need all data, just a few surfaces to calculate physics for bouncing balls.
Is there anyone out there already having bullet/newton in combination with polyvox?

3. John Carmacks netcode for all quake games is awesome. As in quake3 it follows a simple server/client model with interpolation between gamestates and "guessing" of upcoming events ( like movement direction). The world is static, booth on client and on server, sharing the same code for physics and movement prediction.
My quick thoughts brought me to the conclusion that it should be relatively simple to represent a world with polyvox on serverside for deformation calculations, AI pathfinding etc and giving the player just updates of any changes.
Has anyone made something like that before? Are there any ideas/experiments how to combine polyvox with network capabilities?
I thought about something like cube2's cooperative editing, or even the minecraft online play.

PolyVox provides voxel storage and, currently two polygonization anglorithms. The CubicExtractor extracts a "boxy" minecraft-like mesh. There is also a Marching Cubes extractor (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... hing_cubes), which is useful for smooth terrain-like environments. So, it isn't necessarily just "boxes".

That guy has some impressive implementation that everyone on the internet drools at. IIRC he uses a Dual Contouring extraction algorithm, and has some impressive shading. IIRC Dual Contouring allows for some things that Marching Cubes cannot express, like sharp corners. Aside from some technical issues, I'd say it's possible yes, but putting it together would be nice amount of work. Also, it would be impossible with Marching Cubes to represent general shapes like buildings (no sharp corners, unless ofc you do *really* high resolution voxels where it doesn't matter, not useful for a game), but it would be generally possible for (finite) terrain.

Dunno for sure, but most physics engines allow you to send triangle lists to them, so it shouldn't be too hard.

I've seen ker's minecraft client (viewtopic.php?f=18&t=256) and there is the VolumeChangeTracker (http://www.volumesoffun.com/polyvox/doc ... acker.html). Though putting it together with the Marching Cubes algorithm is something I haven't seen done much, but theoretically possible.

I've read in this forum something about the "Transvoxel™ Algorithm" and a dual contor algorithm. So there are ways for optimizing terrain polygonization. Despite that, i think a capable graphic programmer can make use of several tessellation methods provided by modern GPU's.

I'm not sure if it is true, but i read that ID is using some voxel technology for ID Tech 6, the Rage Engine. If they did, they did it bad. ID Tech 6 looks ugly. And still very polygonal ( Sorry JC, but with doom and quake you let people scream out loud "awwweeesome", but Rage? Just...mhm...)

The advantage of Voxels is IMHO the flexibility in changing structure of complex objects. Like destructible environment, or random generated terrain ( AHL, LibNoise etc. ) or the ability of applying physics to them.

The disadvantage is the "cubic" look. Even the videos of this guy mentioned above look very cubic.

I came up with the idea of applying geometry shaders to the pure voxel representation. maybe this is the way to go, to have something like real-time-polygonization directly on the gpu.

In general, my thoughts went into the direction to have a dynamic environment which is changeable during gameplay, while keeping the amount of realism higher than usual approaches ( like in Minecraft).

IMHO this means, you need a simplyfied layer like a voxel representation of the world, which should be able to paginate for flexible network transfer. As well as the render should create a more realistic look and feel ( like polygonization, dynamic LOD and GPU Tesselation ) a server should provide a solid physical representation of the world for simulations like flowing water or bouncing elements.

Is there anyone out there already having bullet/newton in combination with polyvox?

Has anyone made something like that before? Are there any ideas/experiments how to combine polyvox with network capabilities?

I came up with the idea of applying geometry shaders to the pure voxel representation. maybe this is the way to go, to have something like real-time-polygonization directly on the gpu.

My quick thoughts brought me to the conclusion that it should be relatively simple to represent a world with polyvox on serverside for deformation calculations, AI pathfinding etc and giving the player just updates of any changes.Has anyone made something like that before? Are there any ideas/experiments how to combine polyvox with network capabilities? I thought about something like cube2's cooperative editing, or even the minecraft online play.