Your Future Video Games May Be Built Like This

22 responses to “Your Future Video Games May Be Built Like This”

1. 

   negativezero

   January 29, 2013 at 11:52 am

   Voxels are very cool in some ways, but you’ll notice the complete lack of animation here. Voxel rendering is easy, voxel animation is incredibly difficult. As is doing things like lighting and shadows.

   Reply
   1. 

      zetrox2k

      January 29, 2013 at 12:58 pm

      still early days though negs…. remember how polygonal games were in their infancy before skeletal animation etc…. i recon we are still about 10 years away with voxels… there isnt as much of a technological push nowadays with new technologies, unlike years ago… many great strides were made by individuals like john carmack, back when game dev was more of a hobby and an intellectual programming challenge.now its just a money press pumping out crap after crap

      Reply
      1. 

         starchild_killer

         January 29, 2013 at 1:12 pm

         “back when game dev was more of a hobby and an intellectual programming challenge.now its just a money press pumping out crap after crap”

         hahaha!

         oh wait your serious….

         HAHAHAHA!!

         no no…your absolutly right….we had amazing games back then, Like Bubsy, which was an absolute masterpeice and definetly NOT an attempt to ride the trend of a certain other game charachter

         or that mcdonalds game for the original NES

         Reply
      2. 

         negativezero

         January 29, 2013 at 1:28 pm

         Even back in the early days of flat-shaded polygons, we were able to animate them. It’s actually very easy to apply a transform to a vertex in 3D – just a matrix multiplication. In fact, the early 2D stuff that games were doing way back uses the exact same mathematics, and there were 3D vector games in the 70s which animated wireframe stuff.

         Voxel manipulation is exactly the same, except instead of transforming just 3 points to move a triangle on screen, you have to transform each voxel that comprises that triangle. Doing things like simulating cloth or hair or the like would involve moving thousands if not millions of voxels at once. Effectively it’s making up everything in a scene from a cloud of particles.

         The real issue is that Voxels don’t offer us that much in terms of graphical fidelity over what we already get with 3D rendering techniques, unless you are rendering them at tiny size and massive complexity. They’re also incredibly hard to actually sculpt as well. Want to increase the cost to make assets for every game exponentially? Voxels are the answer.

         The only way I can see Voxels taking off is if we also get a corresponding lift in interest in procedural generation of content – they’re quite well suited for that I think.

         Reply
2. 

   knuddy

   January 29, 2013 at 12:15 pm

   Perfect for large scale strategy or flight sims!

   Reply
   1. 

      bangers

      January 29, 2013 at 12:46 pm

      And city builders / transport tycoons.

      I’m guessing that the world there though was not modelled but scanned, so it would find an audience in the business world perhaps. Real estate mock-ups and such.

      Reply
      1. 

         data-cain

         January 31, 2013 at 3:15 am

         It would probably be lidar sourced.
         I use to work for a company doing real time Urban simulations. We never directly used lidar data, as it was no use to us in our ‘standard’ game type engine at the time. But this type of thing engine with lidar would have been awesome for our purpose. 🙂

         Reply
3. 

   screamface

   January 29, 2013 at 12:20 pm

   what the crap is this shit?

   “he video above makes this look like something from the distant future of better video games.”

   you’re having a laugh yeah? That looks fucking awful.

   Reply
   1. 

      chuloopa

      January 29, 2013 at 12:31 pm

      Look at the big boy using his swears!
      We should all give him a pat on the back for showing us just how adult he is!

      Reply
      1. 

         zetrox2k

         January 29, 2013 at 12:59 pm

         yeah i wasnt even going to dive into this argument with him…

         Reply
4. 

   bangers

   January 29, 2013 at 12:30 pm

   Unlike most engines, Atomontage is based not on polygons but voxels. So, think Minecraft, only in this case on a far more detailed scale.

   Yeah except Minecraft doesn’t use voxels.

   Reply
   1. 

      negativezero

      January 29, 2013 at 1:31 pm

      Technically it does, since everything in the world is made up of cubes so the basic building blocks of everything is a voxel. But you’re right, it’s rendering 3D cubes, not ‘voxels’.

      Reply
      1. 

         bangers

         January 29, 2013 at 1:45 pm

         The engine renders textured cuboid polygons though, not voxels. There are many games that do actually use true voxels that could have been used as an example for comparison instead.

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         1. 

            negativezero

            January 29, 2013 at 1:54 pm

            The last game I actually remember using Voxels was C&C2. What are some other examples?

            Reply
            1. 

               bangers

               January 29, 2013 at 2:19 pm

               Well sticking with the Minecraft theme, there is Ace of Spades. The games are pretty similar from a gameplay/aesthetics point of view, but the way they are rendered are what makes the difference, and the article above is about voxel rendering, not the rendering of polygons that look and act like voxels.

5. 

   Samurai

   January 29, 2013 at 12:47 pm

   This will be great for static landscapes and models, but for anything that requires bone rigging for character animation and movement this will just not work. If anyone knows a bit about animation will know what i mean, when you move joints, polygon faces stretch, but with voxels, you will have holes appearing whenever they get moved apart.

   Reply
   1. 

      data-cain

      January 31, 2013 at 3:22 am

      +1

      Coming from a 3D background I have had a few thoughts on possible techniques to fix\hack voxel animation issues: probably already been thought of and dismissed by people a lot smarter than me! But I’d still love to read into what has been tried and the results. 😛

      Reply
6. 

   rowjack

   January 29, 2013 at 1:18 pm

   thats not from Euclideon, thats someone else, good job though

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   1. 

      rowjack

      January 29, 2013 at 1:19 pm

      markus notch claimed the Eucldieon version “bullshit” not these guys

      Reply
      1. 

         data-cain

         January 31, 2013 at 3:23 am

         That’s because Notch is an idiot.

         Reply
7. 

   waterbear

   January 29, 2013 at 3:58 pm

   Looks like they started with an aerial LIDAR point cloud….. then just a bit of real time adding and removing of points. I notice that he isn’t able to recreate anything that looks as nice as the original material during his real time manipulation.

   looks well basic.

   Reply
   1. 

      TS

      January 30, 2013 at 6:46 am

      Unimaginative. This is a technical demo showing that models can be created in a sculpted fashion rather than constructed.

      Reply
8. 

   Douzey

   February 4, 2013 at 2:20 pm

   Imagine this for flight sim o_O

   Reply