The hex based world makes this stand out in a sea of cube worlds.

Cas

My reaction:

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Thinking: "Is this actually speed up?!?"

Now my not-to-take-serious advice: "Go and build a company and sell this game right now... even If I want to play it for fre.. :L"

Thanks

Matheus23, I'm working on that, I hope to launch a kickstarter very soon! Haha, ya, it definitely is fast, but not sped up. Pretty neat to see it in action - openCL is beastly. I did my first generation tests just working with nanosecond timers (and did a few chunks CPU, then a few GPU, ramping up until I did a few hundred at once on each), and the timestamp difference was just enormous. CPU could do a single chunk fairly fast on its own, but GPU seems to be more of a bottleneck at bandwidth than actually terrain generation (which is why 65k blocks in a chunk happens in ~1ms regardless of octaves which in the CPU just kills generation time). I'm working on having openCL push block data right to GL so that bandwidth bottleneck won't be an issue (though I'm pretty new to openCL) - hopefully that'll mean even faster generation time though, because at the moment it's generating the chunks visually that take the most time (and that's just silly). OpenCL should be able to just keep the memory on the GPU and openGL can generate the VBO on its side with no hesitation (I'd just have pass the VBO pointer) - at least that's how I understand it.

Mads - yes indeed, I am going to have a big trailer to show off the full terrain/textures/everything with all the terrain features (floating islands, mountains with overhangs etc.) included with that. Thanks for your input - and I'm glad you you like the popping, flying around like that is a little scary as it tends to look like the ground is coming up mighty fast!

Cheers

This looks pretty awesome!

Thank you!

Just when i thought my comment about hexes was to lame and deleted it

Awesome, I think this will be the first kickstarter I'll fund, because frankly unless you totally rigged the demo, it looks worth it the way it is right now!

Oh and please please please keep the hexes!  It gives things a really awesome style!

More exclamation points!  Cuz you deserve them!  Yay!   !!!  

Edit: just threw in $60.  Cuz you deserve dollar signs more than bangs 

I'm really sorry, but I'm not. I agree this makes it much more original, and it looks quite cool, but minecraft would have never become popular if it had hexes

you can't build "planes" from hexes, "walls" of hexes always got edges. This doesn't even only look bad, but tesselating isn't possible too, and some pc's propably need optimization if they need to render so much blocks...

Thanks everyone!

Sproingie - awesome! I was wondering who backed it for 60$, thanks so much! The T-shirt designs should be done in the next couple days or so, you won't be disappointed! (and if you are, send me a message , and I'll do my best to make them even better!). And as far as the trailer - nope, all just in-game stuff that I shot fairly continuously, plus most of the latest stuff was wrapped into my talking commentary (which I've done more recently), so the game mostly looks and works better than in the trailer (that, and I've been tweaking some stuff due to suggestions I got after posting today - mostly to fix the laser weapons). I've got tons to add, and I'll be updating the kickstarter and tumblr blog as I go!

Sammyster - thank you! Oh (and Sproingie too) the hexes definitely don't optimize as well, but hopefully I can find a good way to fit them in (as you said, they definitely look very alien!) - they are definitely still in the game engine for now - and I'll do my best to get them in there in one form or another!

Matheus23 - yep, this is definitely one of the reasons I am focusing on the cubes right now - they optimize easier - and if I am pushing heavier graphics in other places (weapons, robot models, atmospherics) then I need the optimizations somewhere else

Whoops! The link to the development blog is here: http://tumblr.dysis.net/ Hopefully you can reach it from the main Dysis.net webpage (under dev blog up at the top?), and I've been keeping track of the game since the first day I began working on it (though not every day since, but a lot of the big steps in between!).

Awesome, thanks so much Cas! You're very generous and I'm honored!

This looks really cool!  I am really excited to play this.  By the "free updates for life", does it mean that if you pledge $10 once the final version comes out you don't get any more updates for free (as in, updates from then out will cost money)?  That kinda confused me.  Besides that, I'm going to pledge some money eventually, since I'll really want to play this in Beta (or even Prototype too).

Yep, that completely cleared it up.  I'll be sure to pledge some money for this (and use Kickstarter for the first time ever at the same time) soon.  I'm pretty excited

Holy mother of Java. Oh this will be the first kickstarter I'm ever funding....

Debit*