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Hi,

I'm new here, I've purchased a copy of the Dark Game Studio bonanza pack to get me back into games programming after years off programming boring network device firmware!

I've always had an idea to remake the classic 2D tanks game in 3D using some kind of deformable (maybe even lifelike physics simulation) terrain using a 3D voxel model with some kind of voxel rendering engine.

I purcahsed a new Nvidia 200 series GFX card and looked about the Nvidia developers site, where I stumbled across this article:

http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch01.html

...and wanted to try to implement something similar using DirectX 9c without the use of geometry shaders in DirectX 10. Then I did some googling and found this research page:

http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~gziegler/

...specifically the implementation of real time iso-surface generation from 3d voxel space using Histo-Pyramid extraction accelerated using vertex shaders and thought I could try to implement something similar in DirectX 9c rather than their OpenGL implimentation.

So, what I'm aiming for is to create a true 3D terrain (not a height map), based on a 3D voxel space (3d texture) that is initialised (generated) procedurally using fractal noise algorithms and other heuristics. Then in real time (frame by frame) generate an isosurface using the marching cubes algorithm accelerated by GPU vertex shaders, then rasterised and textured to look natural, much like the example I gave first from GPU Gems 3, but with only using features from Shader Model 3 (DirectX 9c).

The ultimate aim once I have this framework in place is to perform real time physics simulations, or real time deformations on the original voxel space so that the deformations can be translated to a real time rendering on the screen for user interaction.

Do you have any thoughts on this? I'm going to struggle to convert the OpenGL implimentation to DirectX 9c, so any pointers?

Maybe I'm just in too deep and should start by making a 2D tanks game instead, hehehe.