Sujet - Avoyd 0.7.4 - Minecraft importer, Constraints and UI fixes, Custom Game and Performance

It is now possible to import maps from Minecraft 1.13 and above. Importing is faster and uses better materials. We've improved the UI further and started implementing the custom games creation with placement of spawn points in game worlds. The changes we made are listed in more detail below:

Download Avoyd 0.7.4 www.enkisoftware.com/avoyd#download

Further details in the change log: www.enkisoftware.com/changelog-avoyd

Voxel Editor

Minecraft importer: improved materials and faster importer.

How to import a Minecraft map:

Avoyd can load your own maps (stored in %appdata%.minecraft\saves\ ), or download and save a Minecraft map to disk (extracting it if it is a zip file).

In Avoyd go to the Voxel Editor menu File > Import > Minecraft Map... and select the region file directory (containing .mca files) to import it.

Avoyd does not use textures, but the materials used in Avoyd match the Minecraft default materials as closely as possible: their colour is based on Minecraft textures averages and they now have specular reflection where relevant (water, glass, metal...).

Once the Minecraft map is imported you can modify it in the Voxel Editor using the Edit Tool. You can copy/paste other maps and models into it with little height nor size limitation (maximum size is 260 000 voxels in any direction). You can also modify the light and atmosphere settings. You can save the result as Avoyd world files.

From Avoyd you can export the meshes and materials to .obj file for use in Blender or other 3D tools.

Whilst we were improving the Minecraft importer to be able to import with the new version of Minecraft maps (versions 1.13 and 1.16 introduced new formats), Doug took the opportunity to speed up the importer by over a factor of 10. In addition he improved the generation of vertex data. For any interested developers, we've updated our permissively licensed lightweight C and C++ Minecraft Importer library enkiMI to handle these new formats.

Greenfield City Minecraft map, canal showing specular reflection on the water and buildings glass and metal

Greenfield City Minecraft map, stadium under construction

Greenfield City Minecraft map, large view distance, specular reflection on the water

Light and Atmosphere presets

Menu Tools > Light and Atmosphere... > Presets

New shortcuts to quickly change light settings to white, grey, sunny, sunset, dusk and night; and atmosphere: clear, haze and fog.

Greenfield Minecraft map, light and atmosphere presets: Dusk +Haze

Greenfield Minecraft map, light and atmosphere presets: Sunny + Haze

Landscape generated from a moon heightmap, light and atmosphere preset: Deep Space

Edit Tool's Constraints fixes and UI reworked

Menu Tools > Edit Tool

Collision, Constrain Plane and Snap to Grid now work better when combined.

The UI now has shortcuts to make it easier to turn constraints on and off.

Edit Tool new user interface for Constraints and Symmetry. In-world Constrain and Symmetry planes are shown as a plane with a grid. The white grid in this screenshot is a constrain plane.

Game

The main change game-wise is that you can now make your own custom game maps by predefining the spawn positions for the player and for the Skirmish mode's MegaSpawners.

The Spawn coordinates are saved by adding Saved Cameras with the following descriptions: "SpawnPlayer" for player, "SpawnA" and "Spawn_B" for friendly and opposition MegaSpawners. This is done in the Voxel Editor menu Tools > Camera... > Saved Cameras.

Positioning the enemy team's MegaSpawner by setting the description of saved camera _2_ to "Spawn_B"

In-game custom world built using models by Beck Michalak with specified MegaSpawner placement. The MegaSpawners are where each team's drones and players spawn from. They are currently represented as red and blue hollow cubes.

Other improvements

User Interface

• Added Atkinson Hyperlegible font. To change the fonts go into Settings > (Display...) > User Interface Appearance
• Read-only fields now look different from editable fields
• Added several shortcut buttons to make it easier to reset field values to 0
• Extended and enabled camera controls in the status bar (bottom of the screen): align to axis, saved cameras, first person to arcball camera toggle
• Extended the constraints and symmetry planes to infinity
• Resolution and fullscreen/windowed behaviour fixed when toggled

Performance improvements

The voxel to vertex generation performance was improved by both optimizations to the algorithm and by increased parallelism, leading to up to 2x faster vertex generation. Further opportunities for parallelism were also found in the AI movement code and the internal message passing systems.

Fixes

• In a multi monitor setup, Avoyd can be shown in full screen on any monitor (used to only be possible to use full screen on the primary monitor)
• The paste brush centre remains in place when rotating the brush
• Memory leak in network system octree data streaming