Blackvoxel

The story

The story take place in the future. Tired of the civilisation, you decided to retire to a distant world. You bought a new discovered planet in your local planet selling agency.

The dealer made a good price on a paradisiac planet with beautiful landscape with islands, sandy beaches, palm forest and a beautiful blue sky. The catalog showed a friendly world populated of peaceful animals.

You take your new ship and go through the long journey. During the trip, you dreamed of your new world. And finally, after a year of boring travel you reached the orbit and started the landing procedure.

Unfortunately, you hit an asteroid that was not on the map and your ship was heavily damaged. The ship wasn't controllable anymore and finally you crashed on your planet.

By chance, you're still alive, but most of your equipment and materials were destroyed.

As soon as you looked around you, your realized that the planet wasn't what the dealer promised you.

What a strange and desolated world with a black sky and strange luminous blocks !!!

Everything you see is uncommon and you know nothing about it...

As you look on your personal digital assistant, you noticed you received an important email that arrived using powerful long distance intergalactic emitters: the agency said that they may have made a mistake because someone confused planet data files. They said that in the eventuality you remain alive, the sales contract did not mention the details of the surface of the planet, and unfortunately, they can't make any exchange and refund.

But before you can do something, you have no choice: you have no intergalactic ship to escape and no suitable communication equipment to query some help.

What you will do now is up to you...

The game

Blackvoxel is a new sandbox game based on a voxel engine.

Development started in Aug. 2010 as a hobby research project because we wanted to play with voxel based paradigms. With time, the bunch of code slowly became a true game project.

The game is written in the C++ programming language using OpenGL and running on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems.

Compile Blackvoxel from source

Here are informations for compiling and running Blackvoxel from source.

Don't forget to report any difficulty and errors in the forum in the troubleshooting section.

If you've made a port of Blackvoxel or compiled it for an unlisted (or not yet supported) platform, we would be happy to get feedback to improve this tutorial.

Linux

Compiling and running blackvoxel with most Linux distributions is very simple.

See below for per-distro step-by-step instructions.

If you want to go further, modify and debug, we recommend using Eclipse CDT.

Ubuntu

1. Download source tarball (.tar.bz2 source archive) here and put it in your home directory
2. Open a terminal type: "term" in Ubuntu lancher or press 'ctrl-alt-t'
3. Enter the following commands:

    sudo apt-get install build-essential libglew-dev libsdl1.2-dev
    tar -xjvf blackvoxel_source*
    cd blackvoxel_source*
    make

Once build succeeded, you can launch Blackvoxel with the following command:

cd ~/blackvoxel_source* && ./blackvoxel

Debian

1. Download source tarball (.tar.bz2 source archive) here and put it in your home directory
2. Open a terminal:

• Open the activity menu
• Type "terminal" on the "type to search" field at the right of the screen.
• Click on the "terminal" (not the "root terminal") icon.

3. Enter the following commands :

    sudo apt-get install build-essential libglew-dev libsdl1.2-devexit
    tar -xjvf blackvoxel_source*
    cd blackvoxel_source*
    make

Once build succeeded, you can launch Blackvoxel with the following command:

cd ~/blackvoxel_source* && ./blackvoxel

openSUSE

sudo zypper in gcc-c++ glew-devel libSDL-devel
tar -xf blackvoxel_source*
make
./blackvoxel

PCLinuxOS

sudo apt-get install gcc-c++ libglew-devel libSDL-devel
tar -xf blackvoxel_source*
make
./blackvoxel

Manjaro

sudo pacman -S base-devel glew1.10 sdl
tar xf blackvoxel_source*
make
./blackvoxel

Other Linux distributions

Blackvoxel can be compiled in other distros in the same ways described above.

For non Debian distributions, you'll have to find the exact way using the following instructions:

• Install the gcc with g++ compiler, linker, tools and headers.
• Find and Install equivalent packages for required libraries with the package manager in your Linux Distribution.

We hope to add distributions to this list with time.

Windows

Unfortunately, building Blackvoxel in Windows isn't as simple as in Linux due to lacking an equivalent software package management system.

So, it will be harder than in Linux if you aren't really accustomed with programming.

Here is what you need to get for compiling Blackvoxel in Window

• The mingw gcc compiler suite.
• Download and compile the following libraries : freeglut, glew, libsdl.
• Eclipse CDT developpment IDE (Optionnal).

We have tested successfully the tools listed here for the Windows version.

Compilation with other development tools is untested.

Mac OS X

Blackvoxel on OS X is experimental at the moment, so please report any difficulties in the forum or issue tracker

1. Execute xcode-select --install if you don't have Xcode's command line tools.
2. For the GLEW and SDL dependencies, make sure Homebrew is installed.
3. brew install glew sdl
4. Download the Blackvoxel source tarball (or zip file) here and extract it to somewhere in your home directory
5. Use something like cd blackvoxel_source* to open your terminal to the root of your Blackvoxel source folder.
6. make
7. ./blackvoxel

Other Unix variants...

No attempt to compile Blackvoxel on other unixes has been done at this time. In theory, it should work with minimal adaptations.

Anyway, you need to have hardware 3D OpenGL 1 support to run Blackvoxel.