Watching John Carmack's quakecon keynote, he spoke of this "megatexture" stuff in ETQW, with multi-gigabyte textures and vague references to some future "megageometry" system made me wonder if this might be relevent to voxel tech?
I figured if anyone had an informed answer it would be Ken :)
Awesoken at
Without knowing how "MegaTexture" works, I cannot give an informed answer. I hate to guess because it's almost always wrong.
JazW at
Yeah he didnt go into any detail and I imagine its kinda top secret... Theres a video on the front page of planetquake4.net if you or anyone else is interested.
I go through phases of wracking my brain, trying to think of a killer game using voxlap and end up banging my head on the desk, but I havent given up yet!
I searched this forum, and nobody has mentioned zbrush, I'm not much of an artist but modellers I've worked with love it to bits and are producing some amazingly detailed stuff.
It's voxels seem to store all kinds of funky texture and alignment information, yet the models in the voxlap demo are all basically flat shaded, is this a limitation of the engine, or just blobby demo art?
I would have thought a voxel engine would be ideal for all kinds of amazing lighting / volumetric / subsurface effects... But this isnt possible for technical reasons im far too ignorant to understand?
Huge chunks of geometry hanging on by a single voxel wide thread kinda spoil the effect - I assume more complex connection checking is too expensive?
In a related question; physics are aparently the Next Big Thing(tm) in games, do voxels and physics mix?
I also wondered if these new hardware physics cards would be any better than a cpu at the particular calculations used in voxlap?
I always assumed that polygons were just a stopgap measure until computer power caught up with voxels but you, our last best hope, the shining beacon in voxel space seem to have given up... Do you really think voxels are a dead end?
Hope you dont mind me spamming you with questions :)
psychorosti at
Well, i probably can give you 2 answers to youre 6 questions.
JazW said
I searched this forum, and nobody has mentioned zbrush, I'm not much of an artist but modellers I've worked with love it to bits and are producing some amazingly detailed stuff.
zbrush is using mip-mapped displacement maps on a polygon body. Nothing with voxels here. Also, detailed fancy stuff is indeed looking good here, but dont forget that zbrush makes use of very fast gouraud shading-alike technique and because of the subdivision method - all triangles are sorted and even faster to render making it possible to display millions of triangles in realtime,
JazW said
It's voxels seem to store all kinds of funky texture and alignment information, yet the models in the voxlap demo are all basically flat shaded, is this a limitation of the engine, or just blobby demo art?
voxels are just a 3d-pixel. There are noe alignment information or stuff like that, just {x,y,z}+color. In the Demo Ken uses Screen-aligned circles to display those models, or sprites, just to speed up rendering (mainly the z-depth calculations).
Correct me if iam wrong Ken.
JazW said
In a related question; physics are aparently the Next Big Thing(tm) in games, do voxels and physics mix?
voxels is a way to store "data" (world/models/etc) , physics a way of interaction between "data" (or player/ai/world/etc) so you can't use the same algorithms as for polygon-objects here - rather creating new algorithms.
So the answer is yes, but someone has to create those algorithms first :wink:
JazW at
I dont suppose anyone with programming skills lurking this board wants to make some fun little games with voxlap?
I've worked as a technical artist on dozens of mods and a couple of full games but a I'd have trouble writing code for a pacman clone :(
I spent a while exporting models from 3dsmax and running them through poly2vox, the results were pretty damn impressive!
(Note I didnt model this, he's from UT2003)
Highest res I could import (z limited to 512 so maybe import character models laying down and rotate them 90 degrees?)
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxalien1.jpg
and the back
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxalien2.jpg
and in Ken's test game instead of the worm :)
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxlaptest1.jpg http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxlaptest2.jpg http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxlaptest3.jpg http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxlaptest4.jpg
and a few more random models just because voxels are so pleasing to look at :)
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxcar_exterior.jpg http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxcar_interior.jpg
this guy was 65k polys (the limit for the .3ds format)
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxogre.jpg
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxfemale.jpg
Awesoken at
Very cool models. I'm impressed that you've been learning my tools : ) Do you have any voxel models that you've drawn yourself?
voxels seem to store all kinds of funky texture and alignment information, yet the models in the voxlap demo are all basically flat shaded, is this a limitation of the engine, or just blobby demo art?
Basically, each voxel has a 24-bit color and an associated 8-bit index to a normal vector. I use the normal vector for simple direction-based shading. I have never experimented with fancier lighting.
But this isnt possible for technical reasons im far too ignorant to understand?
The problem is voxels are small when compared to polygons. As a result, less time can be allocated per voxel for rendering, which makes fancy effects impossible.
Huge chunks of geometry hanging on by a single voxel wide thread kinda spoil the effect - I assume more complex connection checking is too expensive?
Yes.
do voxels and physics mix?
If they do, I don't know of anything that's small, fast, or elegant.
I also wondered if these new hardware physics cards would be any better than a cpu at the particular calculations used in voxlap?
The last thing we need is another specialized processor. I would rather spend money on a multi-core CPU, which could benefit all applications.
Do you really think voxels are a dead end?
A pure voxel engine is about as practical as a pure electric car. Like with cars, I do believe there is potential in hybrid technology - whether it be voxelized polygons or polygonal voxels : )
JazW at
To my constant dismay, I am a pretty poor artist, but heres a few original models I converted to .kv6:
Unfinished minigun for an unreal tc that never happened:
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxminigun.jpg
A spore inspired toy earth - nearly 8mb!, my biggest .kv6 so far :)
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxearth.jpg
Star trek phaser (tos - with detachable mini-phaser!), for yet another unfinished mod - I was going to convert all the trek props I made, but I'm missing a max plugin and cant load the rest :(
http://www.dubfromatlantis.com/gfx/voxphaser.jpg
I am utterly determined to make a game with voxlap, even if I'm the only person who ever plays it! Now I just need a tame code monkey...
I currently have about half a dozen ideas ranging from vaguely original to straight remakes of classic 2d sprite games - voxels utterly capture that retro sprite look people my age (31 lol) relate to, but omfg its 3d! :)
With multiple cpu's fast becoming the norm and system memory expanding, are you not even slightly tempted to revisit voxlap? :)
sponge at
As for the original post about Megatexture, it's not entirely shrouded, quite a bit is known about it.
I currently have about half a dozen ideas ranging from vaguely original to straight remakes of classic 2d sprite games - voxels utterly capture that retro sprite look people my age (31 lol) relate to, but omfg its 3d! Smile
How about a 2D sidescroller using a voxel engine? It'd be like Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, except with a voxel engine. With a side-on perspective it wouldn't even need to have 6DOF.
Hazard at
Ben Sheffield said
How about a 2D sidescroller using a voxel engine? It'd be like Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, except with a voxel engine. With a side-on perspective it wouldn't even need to have 6DOF.
That's kind of senseless... why would anyone use a complex and very limited Voxel (3D Pixel) Engine for a pure 2D Sidescroller? Especially since full deformable 2D-Landscapes are one of the easiest things to do and are part of the gaming world since the beginning. The 2D Worms series is the most popular example.
JazW at
Yeah I have a bunch of side/vertical scrolling games listed on my "hey that would be cool to remake with voxlap" list. :)
Tanks=pwnage
Worms = Cheesy Tanks Clone
Worms3d = Sucks to be Team17 for not using Voxlap!
As for why use a 3d engine: Because we can.
From a graphics point of view, there are countless things its *so* much easier to do in a 3d engine. It wasnt that long ago most games were sprites rendered out of some high end 3d package, and even now game artwork is still done at higher res in a max or maya then rendered down to a low-poly, normal mapped object our gfx cards can throw around.
Sprites were always just a quick and easy way of showing 3d shapes on a 2d screen because there wasnt the cpu power to render it all for real.
Awesoken at
A side scroller with 3D perspective would certainly look cool using hi-res voxel rendering. My OVERGROU (inside GROUDRAW.ZIP) engine could be perfect for it. It uses a simple heightmap - so should be easy to modify - and the rendering algorithm can probably run nearly twice as fast as Voxlap.
I would be willing to do a little support for a project based on OVERGROU if there was a serious programmer and artist on board. Currently, it's just a graphics demo. I was thinking I could port it to Windows, add a simple API for camera movement, KV6 sprite rendering, and other things like a sound engine. I am not interested in writing game logic, nor am I particularly interested in being talked into something bigger.
JazW at
I've had someone contact me expressing an interest in coding some voxel games, so it seems we might have something here...
I had a look at GROUDRAW (runs at 270 fps lol) and it looks like it would be great for rendering procedural landscapes in an R-Type style shooter?
I still have this notion that voxel engines are ideally suited to procedural texturing and effects, I just hope the things I want to do are possible! :)
Listening to Will Wright talk about Spore has really inspired me to get back into game development, I dont think I'm the only person tired of playing "Yet Another Quake Clone With Prettier Graphics".