Malf on 17/2/2010 at 09:13
Regarding voxels being out-of-date tech, hasn't Carmack been looking in to utilising them to some degree or another? As far as I understand it, voxels offer incredible levels of detail but the tech is currently held back by problems animating stuff made from it.
See this video from 08, although I'd suggest muting the godawful music:
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI)
Ulukai on 17/2/2010 at 09:25
I seem to recall that one of the other problems with them is that 3D cards are pretty useless at accelerating voxels, because they're all geared for geometry and maximising polygons per second.
Software rendering, anyone?
Malf on 17/2/2010 at 09:37
Yeah, from a brief read about the tech past and present, it does seem to very much be tied to processor power.
Zygoptera on 17/2/2010 at 09:58
There's no fundamental reason why you cannot have voxel acceleration on a video card, there just isn't any demand for it. If voxel games were made you could have voxel acceleration exactly as with polygonal 3d, physics or music. But until then it pretty much all has to be done on the CPU.
Briareos H on 17/2/2010 at 10:24
No one's going to be stupid enough to do full voxel rendering these days. That demo shown in Malf's post has, I suspect, polygonal rendering with geometry calculation deferred onto a CPU-based voxel engine (projections in the "sparse voxel octree").
Since CUDA, any kind of calculation can be deferred to a GPU core (Nvidia at least), and it's very probably the way video card designers are going to follow. In a threaded, multicore context, triangle rendering based on voxel calculations with a post processing icing makes a lot of sense (far more than anyone talking about full raytracing).
Anyway, we might soon get all the benefits of voxel rendering (arbitrary LOD with consistent, fixed framerate, potentially impressive physics goodness, lighting based on raytracing) without the inconvenients (low res and ugly cubes), at least if they work out the animating issues. Which is no small task. I'll trust Carmack on that :]
Back on topic, has anyone tried that Oasis demo? I might do that tonight, but I'll also have to get the Crysis Wars demo...
Thirith on 17/2/2010 at 10:35
I think that old tech used well can have a certain aesthetic appeal, just like pixel art. The technical limits can lead to a look that is cool in its own right. I haven't played
Voxelstein 3D, but voxel's strengths always lay in creating a organic, slightly weird look, which worked very well for
Outcast; not sure how well it suits the angular corridors of
Wolfenstein.
Yakoob on 17/2/2010 at 10:44
Quote Posted by Malf
Regarding voxels being out-of-date tech, hasn't Carmack been looking in to utilising them to some degree or another? As far as I understand it, voxels offer incredible levels of detail but the tech is currently held back by problems animating stuff made from it.
See this video from 08, although I'd suggest muting the godawful music:
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI)
I've seen this video before and personally I hate it. why? because it doesn't show anything. It's just a voxel based model where the author boasts at it running at 60 fps. Awesome if you ever want to make a game with a single static, untextured model in it. Also, literally nothing happens in that video. The first 30 seconds is basically a screenshot with the author moving his mouse around spastically as if screaming "look what I can do!"
It's nice that you implemented an octree based LOD for a static voxel mode. Now go and fucking DO something with this.
Fragony on 17/2/2010 at 10:45
Isn't ID experimenting with voxel tech?
Thirith on 17/2/2010 at 11:06
I love the "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" nature of this thread. :p
