Welcome to Voxyforest where you’re at the beginning of a new voxel based life sim style game.
Having loved games like Animal Crossing as a child (this was back during the GameCube era) and having made a walkthrough back in the days, I have been recently reinspired to create a game like that on my own, partially from the influence of the Animal Crossing Movie.
The idea is to use simple shapes to represent the world, with many objects being consisted of “voxels” 3d pixel like shapes. This would save on the lack of graphical skills on my part, while still being able to have a game fit in to a particular style (one that I happen to like as well).
Having decided I needed voxel modelling software, I headed off to google and found some useful tools: In particular DotModeler a 3D voxel modelling software for the style of graphics I want. However having not been developed for native operations on windows machines, odd glitches occured, that with the paring of the program menus being written in French set me off to look for another option. It turned out quite difficult to find modelling programs of that sort so I decided the best option was just for me to write my own modeler.
After many hours of fumbling with a new SDK (JMonkeyEngine 3 Platform – which btw has been fantastic for 3D development in Java for me so far) I managed to get a simple editor up:
Functionality implemented this update:
- Drawing of grids.
- Adding of blocks to the VoxelBox.
To be implemented:
- Saving of objects.
- Loading of objects.
- Choice of voxel colours.
I also have a very simple test scene up, which has me a little bit motivated (:
* For completness sake, I also found another modeling program SolidDots for the iPhone. Unfortunately I don’t have an iPhone to check it out, but it would be great if I could integrate the ability to use this program for creating objects for Voxyforest. I would also like to integrate the “board extending sculpting” idea to VoxyEditor.
VoxyForest / VoxelForest 
Hello.
Your project is very interresting. I have stop mine cause of jme3 and working only in opengl 2.0. If you want, i can give you a copy of my source code. It realy hard to export the model in an optimized format. I can aslo make a english version for windows easly.
Good luke in your project. Don’t fear to contact me if you need infornation on my work.
Hi Shionn,
Thanks for taking interest in my project! A copy of your source code would certainly help me speed up development, as would an English version too. I have sent you an email, please send it to that address!
What was the problem that you had for exporting the model to an optimized format? I was planning to use some simple XML to store the model, which would be far from optimized, but should be sufficient for our purpose.
I really appreciate your offer for help, thank you for contacting me. If any interesting developments occur on this side, I will let you know as well.
Cheers!
Dengke