Comments on: What next for PolyVox?

By: Scott Richmond

Scott Richmond — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:52:26 +0000

Ah great. I mean free is better for me. But I’d also like to see you find a way to continue developing this at a decent speed.

By: David Williams

David Williams — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:42:09 +0000

Actually PolyVox used to be under the GPL (which would then allow for a seperate commercial license which we never tried) but I don’t think we want to go back to this. We basically work on it for fun, and trying to turn it into a commercial product can take away from that. There are other options though, for example I’ve previously done contract work adding features and helping with integration into other engines. This might be an area which can be expanded further in the future.

I’ll meet up with Matt at the Develop Conference in the UK and I expect we’ll have a talk about a lot of this stuff. We do have vague plans for a future project built on PolyVox but we’ll need to try a different development and marketing model than what we used for Voxeliens. Perhaps it can run more in parallel with PolyVox, and also serve a promotional purpose. Well, more on this when we’ve had a chance to think about it…

By: Scott Richmond

Scott Richmond — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 07:34:58 +0000

Obviously you guys are trying to look for ways to make a living off of your work, which is why you side-tracked into game dev for a bit. In my opinion you should consider potentially switching PolyVox to an open-source licence that allows you to sell it to commercial projects. Something cheap and easy like $50.
I think you might find reasonable commercial success with PolyVox if you made it easy to integrate into some of the more popular engines (Unity, UDK, CryEngine, Leadwerks).

Polish it up. Once you’re happy with the core I think its very important you consider developing render helpers such as your CubicExtractor, but more advanced. Dual-contouring comes to mind. I hope to contribute to this at point in the near future.

By: David Williams

David Williams — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 05:53:31 +0000

Yeah, Voxeliens turned out to be a lot more work than imagined. The last six months have involved very little actual development and have mostly been about packaging, testing, distributing, marketing, promotional artwork, etc. To be honest I’m really looking forward to getting back into PolyVox development again 🙂

By: Scott Richmond

Scott Richmond — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 12:18:09 +0000

Hi David,

Thanks for providing an update. I applaud the renewed focus on PolyVox. I had feared it might be abandoned in the effort on game dev.
I agree the first thing that needs to be done is clean up PolyVox and move it into Git with proper versioning.