Matthew on 27/5/2009 at 18:20
As well as damn near every NovaLogic game IIRC.
Sulphur on 27/5/2009 at 18:32
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Westwood's Blade Runner used voxels, and I remember Blood and Shadow Warrior using voxels as well. Supposedly Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 do as well. This shit isn't exactly new.
Of course it isn't. The technique utilising them is, though.
If they get this stuff to work (I don't know how, though, given the giganormous memory requirements) it could cause games to move away from current-day rasterisation techniques to raytracing, or at least a hybrid of both.
Plus you get benefits like artists being able to scrape, carve, and mould in as much detail as they'd like without having to worry about memory footprints/geometry budgets or manage LOD - all of that's automatically taken care of by the tech.
One of the biggest problems at this point, though,
is the memory requirements. The amount of storage required to translate a scene from any given 3D game to this technique will be insane, because instead of polygon geometry, we're talking data for literally every single pixel in the game. How they're going to work around
that I'm not too sure or technically minded to figure out.
clearing on 28/5/2009 at 08:24
Voxelstein 3D: (
http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net)
Quote:
The game world is built from tiny cubes called voxels. There are over 37 million in the first level. Rendering a world like this is slow (especially without hardware acceleration), but there is an advantage: voxels can be added, removed or otherwise altered very very quickly. This enables all kinds of cool stuff, including fully destructible worlds!
steo on 28/5/2009 at 10:52
That looks pretty good, to be honest.
gunsmoke on 28/5/2009 at 11:14
I just played through the first level. Really interesting. I would love to see more levels made for it. The mechanics of the game world (i.e. destruction-based puzzles) make for a fun little game.
Yakoob on 28/5/2009 at 16:50
But see that's the thing about voxelstein or any voxel game. It takes a ton of memory and processing power, and yet it still looks like shit.
Renzatic on 28/5/2009 at 17:53
I doubt Tech 6 is gonna be completely voxel based. Just on a quick glance at that really uninformative video, it looks like everything is still gonna have a polygon backing. The voxels are just for the details. Like icing on a cake, or...you know..textures. But somehow more grand.
As for processing and memory cost, I'm sure there's something going on behind the scenes we're not seeing. Carmack has always been pretty straight up about making everything as efficient as possible. You can see that just by playing around with the Doom 3 engine a bit, or reading about how Tech 5 handles textures. After all this time making slick engines, I doubt the guy just went HOLY SHIT VOXELS WOW and started tossing them in without thinking of the performance overhead.
Edit: If you all want to see just how handy voxels can be for 3D sculpting, just check out some (
http://www.3d-coat.com/v3_voxel_sculpting.html) 3D Coat examples and tutorials. For fine details, they're considerably more flexible than regular polygons. You can just add as much detailing as you want without having to worry about mesh resolution or polygon flow.
Assidragon on 29/5/2009 at 20:13
Quote Posted by gunsmoke
I always was lead to believe that it is WAY too taxing on raw computing power to be useful in games. It seems best suited for still images and the like.
Raytracing in games right now is not so feasible, I'll hand you that. But if Moore's law persists for a while, we might see hardware that can make use of it.
Also, as the scene complexity goes up, it gets not so demanding compared to rasterizing (as far as I can recall, rule of thumb is drawing a scene with rasterizing usually takes a linearly increasing amount of time, while raytracing takes a logarithmic increase). Some features that are very cost-intensive with rasterizing - proper lightning, soft shadows, etc - are also virtually free with raytracing.
So, as games will need more and more detail to be drawn, raytracing will come into view, in my opinion.
gunsmoke on 29/5/2009 at 20:21
Point well taken
