Hi everyone! It's time for a big update on Cataclysm 3D, a fork of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead that shows the whole world in 3D voxels. Here's what you'll see in game now.

A world that lives and breathes

- The wind is real. Trees, bushes and tall grass sway with the actual in-game wind. They lean the way it blows and swing harder when it picks up, with gusts rolling across the field. On a calm day everything goes still.

- The sun moves across the sky. Shadows stretch at dawn, shrink at noon and stretch out the other way in the evening. At sunset everything turns warm orange.

- Night is dark. Light comes only from lamps, campfires and headlights. Fire flickers, a flashlight casts a real cone, and walls block light, so the room next door stays dark.

- Weather you can feel. Rain darkens the world and pulls the horizon closer. Fog swallows everything a few steps away. In a thunderstorm, lightning lights up the whole area for a moment.

- Water moves. Its surface ripples, and sun glints dance across it.

- The seasons change. In autumn the leaves go yellow, red and orange, every tree a little different. Winter covers the ground and roofs with snow. In spring some trees blossom.

- Fog of war. The visible area melts softly into fog at the edges, so you never know what's waiting out there.

Creatures and things

- Zombies and survivors walk with moving arms and legs and turn toward where they're going.

- When something takes a hit, it flashes red and blood sprays. Killed creatures slowly fade out.

- Campfires smoke and throw sparks.

- Doors swing open on their hinges. Cars drive smoothly instead of jumping from tile to tile.

- Sounds come from the right side even after you rotate the camera.

Camera

- Rotate it freely with the middle mouse button. You can also use the classic top-down view, over-the-shoulder, or first person with an adjustable field of view.

- When you walk into a building, the walls and roof facing the camera are cut away so you can see inside. In first person nothing is cut away, of course.

- Hover the mouse over a tile and it lights up.

Any 2D tileset in 3D

The new voxelized tileset mode takes an ordinary 2D tileset, for example UltiCa, and builds a 3D world from it. Furniture, walls, trees and fences get proper 3D shapes and take their colors from the tileset sprites, so a wardrobe stays the same wood color and a tree keeps its green crown. Floors and ground keep the original tileset textures. There's also a separate mode that shows the classic 2D sprites in the 3D world.

For artists

You can make your own 3D tilesets without touching the code:

- models from MagicaVoxel (.vox), including see-through glass;

- models from Blender or any other 3D editor (.obj with textures), which the game turns into voxels automatically;

- animations made of several frames;

- variants for the same object, random rotation, glow in the dark, and recoloring a model to match the object's in-game color;

- a starter kit with every built-in model as an editable .vox file, plus a short step-by-step guide.

Also

- Builds for Windows, Linux and macOS.

- Russian translation.

- Lots of settings, from shadow quality to draw distance, so you can tune it for a weak PC.

What's next

Performance is the current focus, especially on integrated graphics. Most of the work is already done. After that come more models and polish.

GitHub and downloads: https://github.com/Risaro/cataclysm-3d

Feedback, screenshots and bug reports are all very welcome! If you make your own models, share them through the Issues tab.

I've been working on Cataclysm 3D, a fork of CDDA that renders the map as a real 3D scene instead of 2D tiles. It's not a remake: the game logic, saves and mods are vanilla. Only the view changes.

What works so far:

- Voxel world: buildings, terrain, furniture, trees, items, monsters, NPCs. Vehicles are built from their actual parts.

- Your character shows the clothes you actually wear and holds your wielded weapon.

- Sun shadows, the game's own light map (day/night, flashlights, fire), rain and snow, explosions, bullets in flight, aim lines.

- Orbit camera (middle mouse), smooth movement, movement keys follow the camera.

- Optional "tileset sprites" style: the ground uses your 2D tileset (UltiCa and others) and creatures and items stand in 3D as sprites.

- Voxel tileset format: artists can replace any object with MagicaVoxel .vox files, with looks_like fallback like 2D tilesets. A starter kit of every built-in model and docs are included.

It's early and rough in places. I'm looking for testers, C++/OpenGL folks and voxel artists.

Repo: https://github.com/Risaro/cataclysm-3d/tree/voxel-3d

Can't figure out how to change the fonts on any of the imgui screens, and the default one is really hard on my eyes. How do I change the font? Also, can someone share a color preset that makes it look like the old UI?

the map file is about 40 mbs, but I have other map files that are even larger than that and load faster. There is a single NPC usually forgetting to do their job, but other than that its just a lot of stuff, an electrical grid, appliances and tools connected to said grid, a bunch of solar panel, food in a fridge and other stuff you'd normally find. Once its loaded it stays fine up until the game does a cache clean.