I spoke with some of the DirectX team and they said it was possible to make a voxel engine using volume textures, oDepth, and dynamic flow control (DX9) and DirectX10 will have the additional ability to render into a volume texture for the first time - so you can update volumetric environments as well. Has anybody made a Voxel engine with these DX functions yet?
I really think Voxels make more sense for a fully deformable/destructable environment. With Polygons you have to make a special case for every object and I havent seen anybody implement real time deformation/tesselation of all in game geometry....
David at
Voxel hardware
The only voxel hardware I have ever read about is the Mitsubishi VolumePro board.
It retails for $3k to $5k.
I don't know if they plan to implement DX10 drivers for the features you mention.
kraemer007 at
hardware voxel engine?
Sorry, let me clarify. What I mean to say, has anybody done done a voxel renderer using the DX9 functions above? All of the work I have seen use software rendering...
Dragon_Hilord at
I personally avoid all platform-dependant SDKs and libraries. I wish OpenGL would do something similar :roll:.
Voxels might be able to be rendered by grouping them until they break up. It might be a bit of a performance hit also obviously, but the engine could group them into regular shapes that hardware acceleration can handel easily.
JonoF at
OpenGL can do more or less everything DirectX supports, though the difference is the functions are usually implemented with either vendor-specific or ARB extensions. OpenGL standards take a lot longer to be ratified than MS do with Direct3D. Then again, Microsoft only have themselves to worry about, so if they want to throw together a new revision of the spec every six months, that's their choice. OpenGL has a lot more folks at the table.
Jonathon
Frobozz at
That might change a bit now that Khronos has taken over OpenGL. Who knows - maybe they'll speed up development a bit. :)