Planets - Update# 11, Final Straight

Cubical Drift has posted the next update for Planets³ with news the Kickstarter is nearing the end in a few days. and talks about their voxel approach. The game still needs to get funded, and has made $192,308 of the $250,000 goal.

Final straight

Dear backers, first we'd like to thank you all for your incredible efforts so far. We know that a lot of you have already increased their pledge, this is awesome!
Right now we only have one week left and still $63K to go.

From our side we will keep up the communication efforts. We keep getting new interview requests, some coming from major gaming websites. We also decided to distribute a press specific version of our current prototype 3 days ago.

On your side please continue to spread the word about Planets³.

Our voxel approach

A lot of people have asked us about our engine and how we manage to display all these blocks. So here are a few details about the implementation.

In Planets³ we wanted to be able to interact with the entire environment so we decided to use voxels. Moreover we had this amazing gameplay constraint : to be able to see the entire solar system at all time wherever you are. The development of our custom voxel engine required hundreds of hours of work.

To make it possible to see everything, we had to implement a sub-resolution system so that landscape elements that are far away are drawn with less precision (thus reducing required resources a lot). In our game, changing the view distance, only changes the boundary where the first resolution switches to the next.

However sub-resolutions alone weren’t enough to make the game playable, because of the massive lighting and generation computation. Multithreading was the solution but also the most difficult task to implement.

Today’s result is that we have a multithreaded voxel engine that enables us to have an “infinite” view distance in real time.

Additionally, our engine enables us to travel long distances and even to go from planets to planets without any loading time. If you want to explore the planet you are seeing in the sky, you just have to fly over there and land on it.