Why do I suddenly see the term "vooxels" being thrown about like they're something new and exciting?

tekkentool · 4 months

Minecraft does not use a voxel rendering engine, otherwise draw distance would be infinite. It is edited using a voxel based system alright, but the engine uses traditional polygons to render it. It is not what people are talking about when they talk about voxels, which is an alternate rendering system.

Anyway, the reason voxels (particularly SPARSE VOXEL OCTREES) have become popular again in recent memory is because of a few things.

Processing power is coming close to the point where it can be possible in a few years to have the true meaning of voxels realised. volumetric pixels. Where every pixel on the screen is it's own individual voxel entity. This unfortunately takes a lot of memory, and a lot of processing power.

But it means that the game will ALWAYS know how much is being calculated at once, which means you only need to render the visible voxels, which means infinite draw distance is possible.

Use of voxels in small amounts in other games. The bits of deformable terrain in the Crytek engine for example, use voxel technology sparingly for small sections like craters that need to be deformed in real time.
Carmack (of ID software) is planning on using voxels exclusively on the next ID tech engine. This got a lot of people wondering "wtf are they".

Previous voxel games were Ahead of their time, but basically we're now coming into the realm of pixel per pixel voxels and it's getting people excited.

Mugros · 4 months

What bugs me is the fact that every game with some kind of cubes get the description "voxel".

Minecraft is not a voxel-based game. The greater part of the game is divided into cubes, but that doesn't make it a voxel game. It's polygon-based game. These polygons just happen to be mainly cubes.

The announced Castle Story is not a voxel-based game. Look at the trees, the characters, the grass. That are not voxels.

Voxatron is AFAICS a voxel game.

In a voxel game everything is made from cubes and these cubes are all the same size. A voxel is the atomic element. Look at pixels. A picture completely made from pixels. There are no smaller or larger pixels or subpixels.

Noxfag · 4 months

Because we're getting to a point where computers are powerful enough to generate massive Voxel worlds with physics, particle effects etc.

Minecraft is pretty CPU intensive- but imagine Minecraft if every block was 10 times smaller and there were 100 times as many blocks. When we get to the point that we can easily render something like that, we can create some pretty awesome stuff.

polkapunk · 4 months

The only reason you're seeing voxel mentioned so much is because of the success of Minecraft. Voxels have been used for more than a decade with no mention because the graphics weren't a key aspect of the gameplay in the same way as Minecraft. Here are just a few big games that use voxels:

Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun
Command & Conquer Red Alert 2
Bladerunner
Outcast
Masters of Orion III
Alpha Centauri

I'm assuming you meant to type voxel and not vooxel. I've never seen the word vooxel before.

Edit I forgot to mention I got that list from wikipedia. There's more here.

zombojoe · 4 months

Voxels essentially allow you to destroy the entire game piece by piece.

Voxelstein 3D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZUdsRdokO4

The reason they are not used that much is because polygons look a lot better. A lot of older games used to use them but their use was discontinued as graphics got better. They became relevant again once Minecraft became popular and developers looked for alternatives to the expensive to render polygon cubes.

sengoku · 4 months

NovaLogic, anyone?

FonFalleh · 4 months

Aside from Minecraft, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenen, perhaps? (found no relevant trope) http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/

frgnr · 4 months

Also the voxel technology isnt as advanced compared to polygon based models.

look at what notch wrote about the company who tried to find financial backing to support them in advancing the technology http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

"In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node" - so video games that use 2-3 tree models and 1-2 grass sprites isnt just that?

thinkbeforeyoupost · 4 months

I'd be more interested in unlimited detail becoming more popular.

LonerGothOnline · 4 months

Voxels allow deformable terrain. This takes a lot of memory, and ram, to have a lot on the screen.

When a gamer like one such as myself, sees this word, we realize almost immediately, that the game might involve cubes in some way. Voxel might be synonymous with cube now.

I would like to think that voxels are popular, with just the usage of deformable terrain

I wonder however, why it needed its own word?

Rather than wonder why voxels are popular, however (I would just like to point out here that the internet seems to indicate a lot of popularity for the likes of lolcats, /r/aww, /r/pics and well just porno in general? like the totally natural bodily function of mating, is somehow popular?), I'd rather just go by with my day and live my life without commenting on why things are popular at all.

edit: clarity, meaning, grammer (still imperfect), spelling, understanding, usage of words, generally everything.

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