Yes, I agree. I also see not much room for voxels to create interesting gameplay, especially not in games dealing with Astrology. But in games dealing with Biology it could be possible.

But anyway, there are many technical applications for voxels as I already mentioned above.

well i think voxels right now are still in the novelty stage, i think 4-5 years from now they are going to be viable realtime for much more than just clay, but more like atoms (almost like a pointcloud) for everyday games to create a redfaction like technology, for every game.

spike, your point regarding CGI is interesting. It is a common procedure to overcome "writer's block", or any other hindrance in creativity, to artificially restrain oneself. If you set a setting, that's a constraint (you can't just add magic into any sci-fi story). Gameplaywise, if you want the game to be playable entirely with the mouse, that's a huge constraint. And of course, any technology comes with it's own sets of constraints. Voxels are no different in that sense.

I think even with the greatest CGI, you'd still be able to make good movies. Just like the old Star Wars episodes wouldn't (necessarily) be suddenly worse if you were to improve their CGI, right? I mean, there might be some charm to it, but that is, probably, more a subjective thing, related to taste and perhaps nostalgia, than any objective reasoning.
The more possibilities we have, however, the more important does it become to CHOSE our own restrictions.


~ ~ ~ ~

The rest of this will be all about Frank's earlier post. This is a long one. You've been warned.




EDIT: No longer relevant.


And you know what actually sounds like teacher-behaviour? How about this?



Listen, Frank. I hate to do this, but let's take this snippet here:



And let us really take that to heart. I'm an asshole, I'm an idiot, and the last thing I probably should do is to get all high-and-mighty here. But hey, you started it, so you should stand the heat, no?

There once was a user named Phemox. I'm sure you remember him. Do you know why I remember him? Because your arguments with him got so out-of-hand that I once posted quite the text asking you to please stop.

I stand by what I said back then, which was mostly: You seem to be very knowledgable, and you're definitely very talented. You often have good ideas and you come across as helpful and nice. You make so many posts of value, and that's amazing. Have I ever really thanked you for that? I probably haven't, but you deserve it. Thank you for all this. And I really mean it. The community has gotten quiet these days. I can only applaud every single effort to do something about it.

However, for some reason, and I really cannot for the life of me pinpoint it to any one thing, you sometimes seem to get really worked up on things posted here. Which is sad, because no matter what a user posts, it's words on the internet.
And here, it's not even hurtful ones. Or even really mean ones. Back with Phemox, fine, I guess he sometimes replied "lol" to serious arguments, which I agree can easily come across as offensive. I'm pretty sure he doesn't meant it that way, but I can't blame you there. I'd feel offended, too.
But this time?

Has it been this?



This is the first (and from what I can tell the only) instance of something that could perhaps be interpreted as offensive from Jibb. It's very different from saying "WELL DUH YOUR ATTITUDE SUCKS SO SHUT UP". Which of course no one did.
It's also a very clever piece of writing. Is it offensive? No, not really. He's saying "I could have humoured you like a child". As in: You acted like a child? No, that's not what those words mean.
Yes, I know it feels like he said it. I'd feel the same way. I guess it's a language issue.
But he hasn't said it! He implied it, maybe, but he hasn't outright said it. Clever boy. And in some ways, I guess it could be interpreted as a sign of respect as well. After all, he didn't chose that way - since he's treating you like an adult.
Still... this has clearly been written cleverly, and if I were to guess, I'd say that this point shows some frustrations on Jibb's part. You can see he's angry since he has been misunderstood YET AGAIN (which I can relate to, guys, we haven't been talking about the "game or not a game" thing for like three pages). So, with all this, let's take a look at your reply. What did you chose to reply with?

EDIT: Removed on request.

But seriously, what is it that makes you think he's out to get you? And it's not just this thread, you know. You guys have a bit of a history. Has he been a saint? No, he most definitly hasn't. Have you been? Nope. And in my judgement, which I hope you take as a somewhat objective second opinion, I'd say that you're usually the one to attack first. And I'm sure you often don't even mean it. That's what gets to me. You don't intend for these things to come across the way they do, and it breaks my heart to say it, but they DO come across as condescending, and as you're talking them down, and as if you clearly think you're better than them.

I can't imagine you are such a person. I'd bet on the fact that you aren't. Then, why do you sometimes post like that?

... You don't need to answer to that. I should, probably, not click the "submit"-button on this, but I am going to do it, because I feel this should be said. Basically, I'm hoping that you are mature enough to understand how this is meant, to not take offense, and to - hopefully - better yourself.

Hahah. And me, of all people, to say this... I should probably shut up more often. Well, at least, everyone can agree on that, right?

Again, please don't take this the wrong way. I appreciate all you do for the community, I really do. I think it's great you're here, and we both have had discussions before that I found to be valuable, and insightful. It'd be a shame to lose that. But it would certainly not be a shame if you, I dunno, just take a deep breath each time before you post. Because what you posted about Jibb and that astrology-thing was not cool, and it only reflects poorly on you.

I stand ready

Error, for the sake of peace I will not comment on all the things you wrote. The problem is just that we are all very similar, Julz, you, me and maybe even Phemox. We like to analyze things, we talk about it (often with way too much text around simple facts) and we imply things and sometimes we are a bit more direct and honest. I dont see much of a difference and it would be an endless discussing when I start quoting you.

But really, I dont want to harm or insult you or anybody else. So I will not take your wall of text as something bad and will just leave it that way. And I am sure that you are also aware that you wrote all this in the internet

But keeping this in mind I would even suggest to just delete all these off-topic comments. As Julz wrote already, we dismissed the topic and hey, the discussion evolved

I already started and removed the post that caused the misunderstanding. The rest is up to you.

About the voxel stuff... Voxels are just a way to store volumetric data which can be completely deformable environments, characters and whatever as well as medical scans of for example a human brain. That is it, nothing more nor less. Now there are differnet ways to display voxel data, the oldest one would probably be some scan line raytracing, which works well with software based renderers and exist since the beginning of 3d computer graphics. Something like that was also quite popular for landscapes in computer games between maybe 1995 and 2002 or something like that. As such a technique gets really expensive and memory hungry at a high quality for a high resolution, polygon based rendering, which just needs information about objects surfaces turned out to do the better job, especially with graphics hardware optimized for it. Then for some years voxels seemed to be forgotten in computer graphics until Crytec came up with a voxel based aproach to edit their terrains, which allows the user to actually work with the much more user friendly voxel data, whichs surface is then converted into polygon data using some algorythm like marching cubes and rendered using the todays extremely optimized rendering pipeline for polygons.

Most probably the 3D worms games used some kind of voxels to internally store the worlds, one could probably also talk about voxels in the context of minecraft and the really nice game from dust does also use voxels to define the environments. All these games then use a polygon based aproach to display them, as that is the easiest and most effective to feed todays hardware with.

What I want to say with this is, that voxels are no new magic or whatever like what some people still consider shaders to be, but just some streight forward way to store volumetric data, which can be usefull in many cases, like if you for example have an area with lava, an area of rocks above it, some rocks on top of that and then maybe water as the last layer. If you now want the player to be able to dig his way through all these layers, you need this information about the volume, which doesn´t really work with just some polygon surface.

One question:
What did the old geomodengine from the first RedFaction use? Was this voxels? When I remember correctly it has destroyable terrain (limited). But it was the first game I noticed that used this technique so extensivly.
I want to know, because I tried to create a voxel engine myself, and if such an old game can do that I want to know how they did it with such low computing power.

Wikipedia as well as the developer provide some information on that. All that is done in red Faction, is what gamestudios CSG substract in WED does. It is completely polygon based without voxels and then polygons are added and destroyed at runtime.

Some nice voxel examples are Outcast (which seems to render the terrains in software, asuming that there are no caves or something like that and stores that data as heightmap, which is for some reason usually refered to as voxel based terrain, everything else seems to use polygons and is rendered with hardware support):


and Delta Force 2 (which seems to be mostly software based rendering using some kind of voxels for everything):