Zylann
commented
7 years ago Voxels should be editable but currently the module doesn't update the mesh automatically, you have to do it manually. It's a bit more tedious than it sounds because meshes are split in cubic chunks, and editing a voxel lying at a boundary requires neighbors to be updated as well. But I plan to support it indeed (will work on it when Godot 3 will be more stable).
The idea of editable voxels is that you don't modify the mesh, but the voxel data. Them the mesh has to update according to that, and here it means updating between 1 or 8 chunks depending on the location. That process should be fast enough so framerate doesn't drop. In a game context, I plan to add a simple voxel raycaster that doesn't need physics to work. It just needs an origin and direction, then gives which voxel you are pointing at. https://github.com/Zylann/zCraft/blob/master/src/engine/core/raycast.cpp#L14
Individual voxel meshes give awful performance, even with same material so the main purpose of the mesher that uses SurfaceTool is to batch cubes into one mesh by also discarding occluded faces (and adding free AO as an option :D). Then I use chunks so that I can make it of any size while taking advantage of frustum culling. It's currently not the fastest implementation, because SurfaceTool constrains me to repeat vertices I don't need, while I could output indexed vertices straight away. But before changing that I need to see how the Mesh class will change in 3.0 :p
Reduz told me a bit about instancing so I should test this as well to see if some parts of voxel meshes can use it instead of batching.
toger5
Corruptinator
random stuff:
hey, just found time to look at your code. (I don't know if you remember but I also once did a voxel approach in gdscript and than was blown away by your results when you finished (or started... ;) ) your voxel module.) I still really like it and probably will do a project with it one day ;)
actual topic:
I saw that u use the surface tool for the actual mesh generation. how would editable voxels than be implemented? do you have to recreate the whole chunk? or can u find vertices inside a surface tool and change them? (delete replace...) How does godot perform when using a huge amount of surface tools (for each voxel) I saw some discussions with reduz where he said that this should perform pretty well. I didn't try that for now. but I know that in other engines you get a huge decrease in performance when splitting to multiple meshes... (although keeping the same vertex count)
Just am super curious if you already know how to implement it