godot_voxel/doc/source/scripting.md

Scripting

This page shows some examples in how to use the scripting API.

Editing the terrain

Using VoxelTool

TODO

LOD limitation

TODO

Editing performance

See Access to voxels and multithreading

Custom generator

You can provide your own voxel generator by extending VoxelGeneratorScript in either GDScript, C# or C++.

!!! note custom generators can also be created without scripts, using VoxelGeneratorGraph

Example

Here is how to make a bare bones generator usable with a blocky terrain. Make sure you use VoxelMesherBlocky as mesher.

Create a standalone script my_generator.gd with the following contents:

extends VoxelGeneratorScript

const channel : int = VoxelBuffer.CHANNEL_TYPE

func _get_used_channels_mask() -> int:
    return 1 << channel
 
func _generate_block(buffer : VoxelBuffer, origin : Vector3, lod : int) -> void:
	if lod != 0:
        return
	if origin.y < 0:
        buffer.fill(1, channel)
	if origin.x == origin.z and origin.y < 1:
        buffer.fill(1, channel)

In your terrain scene, add another script to a node, which will setup your generator when the game starts. Code might differ a bit depending on how you structure your scene.

const MyGenerator = preload("my_generator.gd")

# Get the terrain
var terrain = $VoxelTerrain

func _ready():
	terrain.generator = MyGenerator.new()

Make sure to have a VoxelViewer node in the scene under the camera, and you should see this:

Though VoxelBuffer.fill() is probably not what you want to use, the above is a quick example. Generate_block generally gives you a block of 16x16x16 cubes to fill all at once, so you may also use VoxelBuffer.set_voxel() to specify each one individually. You can change the channel to VoxelBuffer.CHANNEL_SDF to get smooth voxels using another mesher such as VoxelMesherTransvoxel.

Thread-safety

Generators are invoked from multiple threads. Make sure your code is thread-safe.

If your generator uses resources or exports parameters that you want to change while it might be running, you should make sure they are read-only or copied per thread, so if the resource is modified from outside or another thread it won't disrupt the generator.

You can use Mutex to enforce single-thread access to variables, but use it with caution because otherwise you could end up limiting performance to one thread (while the other waits for the lock to be released). Using Read-Write locks and thread-locals are good options, unfortunately the Godot script API does not provide this.

Careful about lazy-initialization, it can cause crashes if two threads run it at the same time. Curve is one of the resources doing that: if you call interpolate_baked() and it wasn't baked yet, it will be baked at the very last moment. Here is an example of working around this:

extends VoxelGeneratorScript

const MountainsCurve : Curve = preload("moutains_curve.tres")

# This is called when the generator is created
func _init():
    # Call `bake()` to be sure it doesn't happen later inside `generate_block()`.
    MountainsCurve.bake()

# ...

A similar story occurs with Image. It needs to be locked before you can access pixels, but calling lock() and unlock() itself is not thread-safe. One approach to solve this is to lock() the image in _init() and leave it locked for the whole lifetime of the generator. This assumes of course that the image is never accessed from outside:

extends VoxelGeneratorScript

var image : Image

# This is called when the generator is created
func _init():
    image = Image.new()
    image.load("some_heightmap.png")
    image.lock()

func generate_block(buffer : VoxelBuffer, origin : Vector3, lod : int) -> void:
    # ... use image.get_pixel() freely ...
    # ... but DO NOT use image.set_pixel() ...

func _notification(what: int):
    if what == NOTIFICATION_PREDELETE:
        # Called when the script is destroyed.
        # I don't know if it's really required, but unlock for correctness.
        image.unlock()

# ...

Image.lock() won't be required anymore in Godot 4.

Accessing neighbors to generate structures

Generators cannot access neighbor blocks, because they may be dependent on neighbors themselves, and may, or may not be available yet. It's also bad for performance to have threads interdepend on others. A solution to overcome this is to use a seed to drive every calculations so results are predictable.

Noise-based terrain usually don't need any dependency on neighbors, since any queried voxel position will always yield the same values. Generating structures like trees in a Minecraft world is however a bit more complicated.

Deterministic threaded approach

One approach for trees on top of a noise-based terrain allows to keep all the code inside the generator:

• Define a deterministic function that will tell where and how big trees should grow, based on the position of a chunk. It can be made deterministic by using chunk position as a random seed. This function does not need to generate the tree entirely, it should just tell which box it will occupy.
• When generating a chunk, run that function for every neighboring chunk position (8 neighbors + the current chunk, or more depending on the logic). It should be pretty cheap since there will often be only a handful of trees to find.
• Determine the height of each tree using the noise-based generator. Because it is also deterministic, we don't need to generate neighbor chunks entirely.
• For every tree bounding box, check if it intersects with the current chunk. If it does, generate the tree within its own buffer, and paste its voxels in the chunk.

In this approach, it is possible that a tree might be generated multiple times for each chunk it intersects with, but this should be outweighted by the fact it is easily multithreaded and self-contained. Pre-generating a bunch of models up-front can help speeding up the process.

This logic has been implemented in this demo.

!!! note If the structure to generate is larger, then instead of using chunk size as a reference grid, use a larger grid, and use intersecting cells instead so there are less checks to do. If it's a complex structure, it can get subdivided in smaller bounding boxes, to avoid generating everything during the first pass, and only generate it partially when it intersects the chunk.

Custom stream

Making a custom stream works similarly to a custom generator.

You have to extend the class VoxelStreamScript and override the methods _immerge_block and _emerge_block. See

TODO Script example of a custom stream

Creating a terrain node

TODO