Futuristic Voxel Shit

When are we gonna see this shit in an actual game? This stuff blows my mind.

Minecraft doesn't actually use voxels

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mediafire.com/download/1cxja4kmnm1lnsn/FLEX-0.25.7z
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Voxels were the "next big thing" for a while back in the 90s. Famous examples are AMOK, the Comanche series, Outcast, and Shattered Steel.

Technically speaking, voxels are superior to polygons, but all 3D accelerators cards were made for polygons

you don't know what you're talking about

never, because normalfags now associate voxels with autismblocks

Thats because no one talks about it.

i'm still waiting for this to come out

Great, more INFINITE DETAIL shit.

what, you want to have a limited amount of polygons?

You see that Crush 2D logo written on the side of some structures in that video? I am 100% sure the developer of Cortex Command owns/develops that engine. So if it relies upon support from him (for either the updates to Crush 2D or development of the project itself) then you can kiss the hope of seeing this used in a released not-stuck-in-eternal-alpha goodbye for the next decade. I saw this linked YEARS ago on his news feed, and am convinced his mere interest in it has slowed down its development and utilization for videogames somehow. I may be partly jesting and not fully aware of who is using it for games development right now, but that man knows no community relations and time schedule.

idea is interesting, INFINITE DETAIL has been "in development" for years and still nothing came out.

so until I get my hands on a game using voxels in a non shit way, i'm going to call bullshit on this video

b-but user, you saw he was running it on a laptop! it must be real and not some pre-rendered shit
although the framerate did look horrible
i still have hopes for though, i just wish they'd release a demo already

I do.
Voxels have actual depth, the objects aren't hollow. They are superior.

But 3D cards were not made with voxels in mind, so voxels taxs the processor.

Ah yes. We definitely need games where everything is made of rubber and wiggles around like jello cubes.

Or you could just play normal games while tripping on acid!

You will never actually hit the polycount limits nowadays. Polycount isn't really as much a factor as it used to be. The main issue we have as developers is maintaining drawcalls and biggest one being persistent data, it is really difficult to have too many objects loaded into memory all at once with a lot of variety. This is where Voxels don't make a whole lot of sense because most of the effects they create can be faked using Polygons and its been proven that Voxels aren't nearly as efficient as people make them out to be. Yeah its cool that you can dynamically edit terrain ect, but you can do that anyway using a tessellated displacement map. There's plenty of videos for UDK showing this using Polygons.

I still don't see voxels taking off.

May make for some really cool Minecraft-like survival games.

Will Voxel stop letting you fall through the terrain? (then again a well programmed game won't let you fall through the terrain even if it's a paper-thin polygon surface)

What's the advantage of voxels over polygons? Better looking textures+graphics?

Honestly It'd add INFINITE DESTRUCTIBILITY, even with hi-res objects. Imagine the ability for digital gore and gibbing too, or the ability to simulate the insides of an object.

That's not how it works - imagine instead of a polygon or mesh you had a million tiny legos to put together. Each lego is a color, there are no "textures".
Generrally more realistic graphics and physics for lower performance.. ANother analogy is like if atoms were bigger.
I think a good "demo" of (something close to) this technology is the fluid simulation in the "flex" demo. Basically the fluid is just a bunch of tiny marbles that had properties like cohesion and adhesion.
mediafire.com/download/1cxja4kmnm1lnsn/FLEX-0.25.7z

is this some newly-discovered form of exotic plantlife?

Voxels are "superior" to polygons in some aspects, but it's bullshit that GPU were built for anything else than parallel computation, which works great for both voxels and polygons alike.

The main problem is most graphics libraries are built around polygons and not voxels, which makes working with voxels not very pleasant or efficient (for example, OpenGL forces you to pass all vertices of all cubes you want to render, even though it would be far easier to pass a single cube's mesh and then render it a thousand times on different positions). Not sure if next gen libraries are doing something to fix this, but if they do, we might see more efficient engines in the future.

Other problem voxel engines have is that they may have to be mixed with polygons at some point unless you want to deal with the nightmare that probably is performing skeleton deformations on a voxel object. It's already not an easy task with polygons, but with voxels, things may get even more complicated quite fast.

So, what are the advantages? Voxels are quite efficient since logical division of a world or a mesh is piss easy. No need for complicated binary space partitioning that increases polycount, as the world is just made up of voxels and macrovoxels, and these may be of variable and arbitrary sizes. This makes culling very easy, so you can technically make "infinite" worlds without stressing the computer too much. They are also said to produce more organic meshes for some reason, but I doubt this can be proven in some way.

correction, you really don't know what you're talking about

INFINITE DETAIL is some australian shitposter plagiarizing a bunch of ancient voxel techniques for grant money.

That shit is trippy.

Voxels are already in use to a limited extent: Crysis used voxels in its terrain system for caves and in popular games like nuDoom/newer Cryengine titles voxels are used in the backend for culling or illumination stages. It's a decent system for terrain but as far as destructible environments go I'd probably use something else until sparse voxel octrees and all their advantages become feasible.

That looks disgusting.

...

I wonder if that is ever going to be finished, the dev even stopped shitposting on their blog last year.

What are voxels then?
I always went with definition of something like 3d pixel, so cube that is used to make game world.
Like posted. What minecraft did differently?

So everything is made of foam and the graphics are muddy as fuck?

Outcast wasnt that special either, seems like gameplay is an aftertought when voxels get involved.

To truly use voxels means that all the entities in your game are actually rendered with tiny cubes, rather than traditional polygons. While Minecraft uses voxel-style data to store world seeds, the game renders with polygon cubes that mimic voxels.

Voxel is supposed to be the "basic 3D unit" just like a pixel is supposed to be a basic 2D unit. Minecraft doesn't use voxels of the same size for everything, and sometimes it doesn't even pretend it's using voxels. It's like calling your pixelshit game "pixel-based" when you are using mixels and some vector graphics in there.

Anyway, it's not using any of the advantages voxels offer. It's like saying raycasting games like Doom are real 3D games even though they don't use any polygons as we know them in 3D.


Look up Marching Cubes Algorithm. Blockscape uses something like that, and Terraria used the Marching Squares Algorithm, its 2D equivalent.

Fuck I was expecting something like shitting on me for using a term pixels for a moment.
Well thanks anons.

However is it fair to say Minecraft is not using voxels?
I mean pixels are nothing more than 2d matrix with data in it. 3 matrices to be specific, each for RGB. So wouldn't voxels just be 3d matrix with data of game object in each slot?
As wiki is bad source it literally says what I am saying here:
Minecraft uses polygonal graphics but at the same time its world is voxels.

if it's anything like the last project from this guy, it'll eat 8GB of RAM and never free any of it.

Graphics-wise, yes it is. Minecraft does not use voxels to render its graphics, it uses polygons. It does however use voxel data, making it a hybrid of sorts.

Well I will be able to settle for this resolution and calling OP faggot.
Just don't remove minecraft and polygonal graphics game from this thread. I for example just want voxels because of environmental destruction more so than pixely graphics.

One and only reason I liked Worms 3d. It might have shit worms game but destroying stuff in 3d was nice.

Also I am not sure if Worms 3d used voxels. I am 90% sure they made terrain destruction using them but not 100%.

Actual voxels like in the video are effectively virtual atoms on an evenly spaced 3D grid. The benefits of imitating how reality works rather than using hollow, paper maché shells of polygons is obvious. It's similar to the use of basic lighting with faked shadows rather than using raycasting.

That technology would be great for soft body physics in lewd games.

1993

When is that unlimited point cloud data going to get used in a game?

Technically, it does, in the sense of what the "blocks" represent (obviously the polygons aren't voxels, as explained in a bit more detail below).
i.e. block equates to: empty/not empty (via noise, hence a density field) -> density check at grid point -> within or outside of 3D space of object? -> voxel representing empty or !empty (due to representing if point in space is inside/outside 3D object).

The same applies to other methods using density/scalar values.
They are technically voxels in respect to what they represent, and this can be seen in Terraria (marching squares, 2D isosurface contouring algorithm), NMS (using dual contouring, 3D isosurface contouring alg using "dual edge" scheme as compared to marching method which is a "primal" corner method), and Crysis' terrain (using marching cubes, primal 3D method).


This user is saying the current paradigm of GPU APIs aren't functionally built for voxels.
I.e. there isn't stages specially built in the rendering pipeline for voxels (probably referring to SVO type, which would mean it would have all the functions related to this, and the respective stages easy to use w/intrinsic functions and like that we have for the functionally built polygon pipeline).
Modern pipelines revolve around the components of polygons (vertex stage, tessellation, etc).
However, something like the pixel/fragment stage (coloring + shading calculations, basically) would be apart of either pipeline; be it SVOs or polygons.

Voxels are a lot heavier in terms of the computational complexity of the stages (SVOs), and are technically inferior to the rather simple computations required for each stage for polygon/raster based rendering.
Not to mention the current issues that are creating "hard blocks" in the progression of even using this for actual games.
Animating + skeletons for models… which can be done but is a fringe topic, soft bodies… again fringe and the aforementioned issue of having to build your own pipeline to actually do this efficiently (not to mention integrating physics calculations for each voxel which requires simplifying this, etc).
They are, however, superior in the terms of rendering fidelity, potential applications, and the simplicity of application (e.g. artist modeling, no need for textures, etc).


It uses octrees (SVOs) which are evenly spaced, but not necessarily evenly subdivided (LoD).


More like fragments/pixels making a "cube-like" shape.
Which, depending on the approach, are represented via a RGB value per voxel (also other values, like shading related (normals, etc) + auxilary alg inputs all compressed, and are "cube-like" because each face (octant cell) of the voxel's color values/shading data which are rendered as fragments (sets of pixels making up the faces per octant of the octree, i.e. a fragment per face).


For mainstream… not anytime soon.
As there needs to be more minds working on this other than some fringe devs, and the specific parts of the GPU APIs necessary aren't necessarily widely supported enough for major players to dive into this (I.e. leaving out older generations, which don't have access to modern shader model API related functions/etc).

UNLIMITED DATA

kek, I read it as unlimited detail, woops