PolyVox on Android

Following a previous post about PolyVox on iOS, I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks experimenting with RIM’s gameplay engine as a basis for future projects. Naturally this has involved integrating it with PolyVox and today I have some initial results to present. The video below shows gameplay and PolyVox working together on my Samsung Galaxy S Plus:

The voxel world is one of the levels from Voxeliens but this doesn’t necessarily mean we are bringing Voxeliens to mobile (we might, but we’re just experimenting for now). It was basically just the data I had closest to hand, and the volume dimensions are 128x128x32.

To be honest I’m pretty amazed at how well it runs! I’m seeing a steady 40-50 frames per second and this seems to depend on how many pixels are being drawn. I need to do more investigation into the performance bottlenecks though. Also, be aware that this is a debug build as I’m new to Android development and I don’t know how to do release builds yet (it requires some kind of signing I believe).

Getting PolyVox to build on Android was not too difficult. The only problems were complaints about std::function and about throwing exceptions. For now I just cut out the offending pieces of code but we’ll have to come up with a proper solution in the future.

I really like RIMs gameplay engine, and if we do decide to use it for future projects then it opens up a lot of platforms for us. And after all the work we did on Voxeliens it’s great to be getting back to playing with technology again 🙂

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