Prototype for building and exploring in a Voronoi worldHello,
This is the first public version of vorfract (short for voronoi fracturing, as that's essentially how it works).
It's a voxel building environment which uses irregular voxels instead of the usual cubic grid ones. This allows voxels to have sloped/inclined faces, which are pretty useful for roofs, steep terrain and so on.
Since irregular voxels (called cells) aren't arranged on a grid anymore but can move freely, the result is a solid world that has a "low poly/rocky" look rather that the usual "blocky/boxy" one and I admit I kind of like it, at least for the most part. To be honest, the "cellular" aesthetic is a big reason why I felt compelled to take on this project.
So far, I've focused mainly on the geometry/building part, so the exploration part is more about exploring the shapes you can build and less about the world itself. Though I'd like to get there one day, if possible.
About the building tools:
As mentioned on the front page, everything in vorfract is made of cells, so all changes are made using tools that recursively break/unbreak them.
Since a cell's position and shape is determined by its kernel (called a generator) and its surrounding cells, shaping objects ultimately comes down to placing, moving or removing generator points.
There are several tools available at the moment, but I think only a couple of them are the most important:
1. First is the grid digger, which should be familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft, as it breaks and digs/fills cells along a grid.
2. And second is the saw, which breaks/cuts cells according to the current cutting plane (which can be given by a line or triangle drawn with the pointer or by hand, if you are good with numbers).
The other tools are mostly either variants or special use cases that can come in handy at times.
In principle, it's possible to build or sculpt pretty detailed shapes (as can be seen in the demo map loaded when first starting the game), but obviously in practice, 'possible' and 'easy' aren't usually the same thing.
Since the current tools aren't smart enough to operate seamlessly across the cell borders, any mismatches and loose ends need to be corrected by hand and this kind of gets in the way of what you can do without trying too hard.
Also, working with cells at different recursion levels can easily lead to unintended/unwanted results. There is no undo or any other safety mechanism at this time to protect one's work from being wiped out by mistake (eg, the unbreaker tool can easily do this - *save* before using it), so it requires constant attention.
I'm still thinking about the best way to solve these things.
The experimental maps (especially the round/hollow worlds) are pretty much that: they work just enough to have a look around, but some of the tools don't work there yet (grid digger) and might even crash when used.
So just to be clear, this is only a prototype I've been toying with and I'm still testing out its possibilities and limitations. But instead of waiting until it's complete and all major bugs fixed, I thought I'd put it out as it is and hopefully see what other people think of it, while I continue to develop it and fix all the current issues.
Note: Since this is a prototype, there are still *many* crashes left and things that don't work properly (or at all), so if you do play around with it, don't forget to save! (often)
And one more thing: the app is hosted on itch.io at the moment with a "pay what you want" model, but the payment option is included mainly as a way to buy it cheaper now than in the future (assuming it's successful and gets a "proper" release) or if you would like to show support for the project (thank you! in that case), but otherwise, there's no payment required at this time, so feel free to play around with it (both Web & Windows versions), no strings attached.
Other than that, what else can I say?
I hope you enjoy this app, even though it's far from finished and use it to build something lovely!
Saturday, May 17, 2025 @ 22:53
This is the first public version of vorfract (short for voronoi fracturing, as that's essentially how it works).
It's a voxel building environment which uses irregular voxels instead of the usual cubic grid ones. This allows voxels to have sloped/inclined faces, which are pretty useful for roofs, steep terrain and so on.
Since irregular voxels (called cells) aren't arranged on a grid anymore but can move freely, the result is a solid world that has a "low poly/rocky" look rather that the usual "blocky/boxy" one and I admit I kind of like it, at least for the most part. To be honest, the "cellular" aesthetic is a big reason why I felt compelled to take on this project.
So far, I've focused mainly on the geometry/building part, so the exploration part is more about exploring the shapes you can build and less about the world itself. Though I'd like to get there one day, if possible.
About the building tools:
As mentioned on the front page, everything in vorfract is made of cells, so all changes are made using tools that recursively break/unbreak them.
Since a cell's position and shape is determined by its kernel (called a generator) and its surrounding cells, shaping objects ultimately comes down to placing, moving or removing generator points.
There are several tools available at the moment, but I think only a couple of them are the most important:
1. First is the grid digger, which should be familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft, as it breaks and digs/fills cells along a grid.
2. And second is the saw, which breaks/cuts cells according to the current cutting plane (which can be given by a line or triangle drawn with the pointer or by hand, if you are good with numbers).
The other tools are mostly either variants or special use cases that can come in handy at times.
In principle, it's possible to build or sculpt pretty detailed shapes (as can be seen in the demo map loaded when first starting the game), but obviously in practice, 'possible' and 'easy' aren't usually the same thing.
Since the current tools aren't smart enough to operate seamlessly across the cell borders, any mismatches and loose ends need to be corrected by hand and this kind of gets in the way of what you can do without trying too hard.
Also, working with cells at different recursion levels can easily lead to unintended/unwanted results. There is no undo or any other safety mechanism at this time to protect one's work from being wiped out by mistake (eg, the unbreaker tool can easily do this - *save* before using it), so it requires constant attention.
I'm still thinking about the best way to solve these things.
The experimental maps (especially the round/hollow worlds) are pretty much that: they work just enough to have a look around, but some of the tools don't work there yet (grid digger) and might even crash when used.
So just to be clear, this is only a prototype I've been toying with and I'm still testing out its possibilities and limitations. But instead of waiting until it's complete and all major bugs fixed, I thought I'd put it out as it is and hopefully see what other people think of it, while I continue to develop it and fix all the current issues.
Note: Since this is a prototype, there are still *many* crashes left and things that don't work properly (or at all), so if you do play around with it, don't forget to save! (often)
And one more thing: the app is hosted on itch.io at the moment with a "pay what you want" model, but the payment option is included mainly as a way to buy it cheaper now than in the future (assuming it's successful and gets a "proper" release) or if you would like to show support for the project (thank you! in that case), but otherwise, there's no payment required at this time, so feel free to play around with it (both Web & Windows versions), no strings attached.
Other than that, what else can I say?
I hope you enjoy this app, even though it's far from finished and use it to build something lovely!
