Voxels making a comeback?

Posted by Scott_AW on Nov. 9, 2010, 12:41 p.m.

Yes, thats right, voxels are coming back in my life after a brief vacation.

Lately this guy has been working on a voxel engine.

http://www.voxelgames.com/

After a chance visit to the usually negelected Ken Silverman Forum, I saw a new post of someone reviving a voxel engine that they were working on a few years back.

Apparently I emailed this person in the past(last year) and they weren't working on it anymore…but apparently that has changed!

However, doesn't mean the Voxel RPG is back in action just yet, as the voxel engine is not quite ready for a FPS.

But, it is, by the sight of the videos on the website, able to handle a side-scroller engine ala retro NES style.

So hopefully soon he'll provide me with a DLL to try and interface with and see what can be done with what is there.

So stay tuned for possible updates in this.

Otherwise I'll be trying to work out a A* system for the RTS engine I was working on.

In another side project, I started creating a more traditional Tile Editor for multi-layer systems. The RTS editor is only a single layer, with overlay objects.

I'll have a new version of the RTS map editor up sometime and a quick game play demo once the A* system is finished.

Besides that, if I have success with the voxel engine DLL, fantasy or sci-fi?

Comments

Majatek 14 years ago

Quote:
my friends and I discussed how awesome it would be if someone made a voxel-based OS/system for a console [or computer] as opposed to a raster/vector graphics system [that is currently used in all rendering systems today - which has to EMULATE voxels in an emulated/virtual environment]

Also;

Quote:
voxel-based hardware

Not vector/raster based hardware of todays that has to emulate voxels through calculations and such. Imagine it as if it were Game Maker trying to draw a d3d environment as opposed to using a true renderer such as Ultimate.dll or Ogre. Except with hardware involved.

We can still dream though. Also, just because someone talked about something doesn't mean it would be practical or that it would exist in the next second.

Juju 14 years ago

Mobile phones were inspired by Star Trek. Innovation follows the dream.

Majatek 14 years ago

Juju is right - back then (When Star Trek was first known), everyone went "Pshhh… A vocoder that automatically translates languages? Yeah right…"

Suddenly, BableFish. Also, there is an audio translation feature on YouTube - couple that with BableFish, and you've got yourself an irl Vocoder.

Cesque 14 years ago

Quote:
Juju is right - back then (When Star Trek was first known), everyone went "Pshhh… A vocoder that automatically translates languages? Yeah right…"

Pshhh… A vocoder that automatically translates languages? Yeah right…

Quote:
Mobile phones were inspired by Star Trek. Innovation follows the dream.

Well… pursuit follows the dream. You could feed all of Europe (or was it Africa?) for the next century for all the money wasted on teleporter research (and a bunch of other things) because "it worked in Star Trek".

You know what else was inspired by science fiction? Videophones. Remember those? They were all the rage somewhere back in August 1998.

PY 14 years ago

In the future, yes, it'll be possible, but you're effectively asking it to physically model every particle in the game world, that can't be done yet. Regardless of technobabble like "voxel based hardware" (It's all just number crunching!), the resources required to do that may not exist at all, and if they do, they're certainly not cheap enough for a console, where an 8 core processor is something special.

As much as science fiction can inspire the present, that only happens when the dreams are realistic - nobody's invented a warp drive yet. We don't have artificial gravity, or a reactionless drive. The holodeck is a pipe dream, and the replicator isn't even close to the market. As nice as it would be to perfectly simulate an entire 3d world, it's not a case of shoddy coding holding us back.

Scott_AW 14 years ago

Technically voxlap has physic and fully destructable enviroments. It's just a bitch to compile it.

Majatek 14 years ago

^This. Also,

Quote: Cesque
<snip>
Get with the times, old man.

Scott_AW 14 years ago

However, you can always get the Voxelstein engine code which has been converted to work with VC Studio 2005, which I believe is free….haven't tried to compile it though.

Majatek 14 years ago

Still an old game, Wolfenstein.

But it's nice seeing voxels being used in real time destructible environments.

Juju 14 years ago

Voxelstein is pretty cool. With a bit of extra streamlining (hardware dedication aside), it could be an interesting step forward for games. Or it could fall flat on its face, one of the two.