Glad you guys are liking it! SexyMustard and I are looking to have a release out very soon -- hopefully by sometime next week.
Whoa, yeah! That's looking incredible. A question, though - how does it handle water? Does it do it the same way as before, or has it been changed?
It's changed a lot. Unfortunately, water is probably what's suffered the most in this version. The old approach was pretty bad, though -- always calculating every reflection/refraction map and hanging the program while it happened. And not to mention floating planes of water....
Right now water is just stored in the voxels like anything else, properly respecting water levels from 0 to 7. So it'll be more shapely and less weird for this version. PolyVox doesn't support voxel transparency though, so it'll be a solid water texture (no transparency) that will be drawn just like all the other geometry. Once we get the custom extractor rolling, that will change and we'll be able to start going back to the previous approach but in a better way.
Shiny!
Build an Alliance Cruiser in DF using obsidian and olivine (I think olivine's the green stone, do I have that right? none of my forts get much of it) and/or green glass, whichever seems to be the right level of light/darkness (maybe some spots would be one and some the other), and then get pics in Overseer! Or let me do it, but I won't get around to it for quite a while. Maybe I'll put it on the megaprojects wiki page if they've got one for the new namespace.
On an unrelated note, maybe it's the particular woody-lookin' but brick-patterned texture combined with curved corners and nicely smoothed image/shape edges, but the fort looks somehow less real in those shots than in the earlier, sharp-edged ones. We'll be able to adjust the roundness or even adjust it for different type of materials or the difference between dug out walls and constructed walls eventually, right? (Actually, I think that there might be the key difference: dug out walls/floors should be rounder/smoother than constructed ones, which should seem, well, constructed, I'd expect.) Well hey, even if we aren't (or not anytime soon) this is incredible on the whole -- it's subtle, but I think it does seem better graphically speaking than the previous shots, and it sounds like it's become a lot more potentially portable and scaleable/extendible/customizable than it had been, or at least has a framework for being so. Very much looking forward to trying the new version. 8^)
I'm tempted to ask randomly about lighting settings such as day and night, how light gets into dug out areas, torches/lanterns/lamps given that the game doesn't let you place such things (yet) and given that it has natural caverns they wouldn't be present in, etc. But that's probably because I've forgotten what I've heard on the topic earlier in the thread. And the truth is it'll probably be obvious and/or come back to me what Overseer does and doesn't do in terms of lighting once I try it. So nevermind. XD
Yup, I agree. Marching Cubes, unfortunately, doesn't let you choose between soft edges and hard edges, so if anything gets smoothed, EVERYTHING gets smoothed. There's another, newer extraction method for voxel data called "dual contouring", which PolyVox doens't yet support. The current plan is to begin implementing a dual contouring extractor shortly after the next release or two of Overseer.
Lighting for the moment is just directional light (from the sun) that isn't blocked by anything, so the caverns aren't pitch black. It's a very simplistic model that needs revisiting in the future -- once I figure out how I want to handle it. If you have any suggestions, fire away!