Voxel Engine

Liquid

Member
Why did you name it "Voxel Engine" it looks like textures on the cubes. Normally Voxels are no cubes but dotts or squished dotts shaping the ground. So it looks like regular 3d Engine. One single Voxel should be a single color... or am i wrong ?
Looks nice though :)
 

lolslayer

Member
Well the thing is, what liquid is talking about is what voxel engines used to be, but since the release of Minecraft blocky games took over the name, and nowadays when you ask gamers about what voxel engines are they'll mention games like Minecraft and probably terraria too, so I don't see why it's wrong to call this a voxel engine.
 
S

Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
Well the thing is, what liquid is talking about is what voxel engines used to be, but since the release of Minecraft blocky games took over the name, and nowadays when you ask gamers about what voxel engines are they'll mention games like Minecraft and probably terraria too, so I don't see why it's wrong to call this a voxel engine.
If the reason it got a new meaning was because of a dumbing down of information rooted from ignorance, I'd say we have enough of that going on already in the English language. :p (I honestly don't care, I'm trying to sound like an old person).
 

Liquid

Member
from the name i have to assume that the engine is not able to calculate other cubes that are smaller or located slightly off the grid or even with other angles ... the important thing about voxels are (as far as i know) they are drawn based on their location in space and not calculatd by edges and verticies that define their boundaries..... and when i see cubes i get confused :p i would never suspect that minecraft cubes count as voxels.. but i guess as they are all very similar and identical orientation and size it could be counted as voxel... but i never heared ot that (yet).

back in times of magic carpet the voxels had no apperance of polygons at all...just bent dots/ squished flat thingies... and invented because of lack of cpu power and gfx acceleration not invented - ironic to do voxels in gm2 *giggles*

but im still impressed of the engine itself :) good job
 
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Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
from the name i have to assume that the engine is not able to calculate other cubes that are smaller or located slightly off the grid or even with other angles ... the important thing about voxels are (as far as i know) they are drawn drawn based on their location in space and not calculatd by edges and verticies that define their boundaries..... and when i see cubes i get confused :p i would never suspect that minecraft cubes count as voxels.. but i guess as they are all very similar and identical orientation and size it could be counted as voxel... but i never heared ot that (yet).
Fair enough.

Now that we're done critiquing his title choice. This does look like a very nice Minecraft clone. Personally I think if you are making a clone there should be a big twist to it to make it stand out from being just another Minecraft game, but I'm sure you will work that out as development progresses. :) very ambitious project and a lot of passion and love went in to all this work, you should be proud. Every Minecraft game author has a lot to be thankful for when they finally have their game to show to the world, whether complete, a demo, or screenshots. You did great. :D Where as there are other games out there which could obviously be made in much less time...
 
@Samuel Venable Haha much appreciated :D well the thing is this is an engine for the marketplace :D
@Liquid Ahhhh yes this is still voxels did you know ? And in all technically these are 3d pixels (relative to size :D)
@Fanatrick Uh these are actually 3d pixels, they are literally 3D pixels XD

@lolslayer Hey son :D

This is a voxel, and i am indeed displaying voxels :D, dont be fooled by the size of the player in correlation to the blocks, the blocks are literally 1 pixel in 3d space, and the player is moves at like 0.0 whatever :D : https://www.google.com/search?q=wha.....69i57j0l5.3259j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 

TheSnidr

Heavy metal viking dentist
GMC Elder
Very nice! How do you store the voxel information? Is there a hard limit to the size of the terrain? And is it easy to add and remove voxels? I'm tinkering with voxels myself these days :D
 
@TheSnidr Ah yes im using a dll called byte prisms but i altered the source code so that i can store 2 byte values. The world limit is 3072x3072x192 but its not like i couldnt make the world infinite and just use buffers to store the data, i just took a shortcut. And yeah ive seen your work via twitter its impressive and im a huge fan of everything that you create in gm :D

And yeah i just had to do a bit of raycasting and updating of surrounding chunks and boom :D
 

Joe Ellis

Member
This looks cool, it's a proper voxel engine, I've done similar things aswell, but I decided to not use real voxels cus of how much memory it uses, it ends up being a "voxel game", not that that's a bad thing, but most games will wanna use voxels but not be strapped down by the voxel format, more probably use worlds that look voxely, in this case it is much better if you just convert the voxel code to make a mesh, rather than a whole 3d grid system, cus a mesh only deals with the parts that exist and don't need all the grid space for the empty blocks
 
This looks cool, it's a proper voxel engine, I've done similar things aswell, but I decided to not use real voxels cus of how much memory it uses, it ends up being a "voxel game", not that that's a bad thing, but most games will wanna use voxels but not be strapped down by the voxel format, more probably use worlds that look voxely, in this case it is much better if you just convert the voxel code to make a mesh, rather than a whole 3d grid system, cus a mesh only deals with the parts that exist and don't need all the grid space for the empty blocks
What do you mean "because of how much memory it uses ?", are you saying its better to make a static mesh ?
 
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