Voxel Terrain - 1995, 486 CPU - Jason Doucette

Fully 3D photo-realistic (in 1995), real-time, terrain rendering engine on 486 hardware. More info: http://jasondoucette.com (Extreme quality lost during YouTube upload.) Same voxel map rendered in Comanche: Maximum Overkill: http://youtube.com/watch?v=51E_G7NCXVM

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• voxel
• terrain
• engine
• Jason
• Doucette
• height
• map
• Xona
• Games
• Duality
• ZF

[Disemboweller]

I know this was put up a very longtime ago but I just wanted to thank you for the upload. It's one of those little things there to remind people that voxels exist and are really very cool.

[JDoucette]

@Disemboweller Hey thanks for the message, I appreciate that. You're quite welcome. I have an affinity for voxels for sure, and have been meaning -- ever since I invented this rendering formula -- to make some kind of procedural and variable terrain in some kind of game.

[sparkle6411]

Jason this video is so cool. It gives one the feeling of hang gliding.

Did you ever live in Arlington Mass.?

Sparkle

[JDoucette]

Thanks for the compliment. No, I have never lived there. Why do you ask?

[sparkle6411]

Used to know a Jason and Eric Doucette a long time ago and just wanted to say hi. I miss them.

[JDoucette]

Sorry, it's not me. I've lived in Canada my whole life. Good luck in your search for them!

[JDoucette]

Yeah, and there's even some for cell phones, as well. It is impressive. Now with 3D hardware polygons, it seems the only place voxels have left to look cool is on low powered software graphics devices.

[ZeeKat]

Funny thing is there are voxel landscapes in some 8-bit atari demos. Surely not up to this quality, but still damn impressive for a 1,79Mhz CPU.

[Rummy44]

Woah.

[JDoucette]

The terrain comes from Comanche: Maximum Overkill. The program leaves the terrain data in memory when the program terminates. The demo group, Iguana, captured this memory, and used it in a voxel effect (that has a notable perspective flaw, but otherwise gave me the inspiration to program it myself) in their demo, HeartQuake. I 'stole' it from HeartQuake in the same manner, with a simple memory capture program I wrote.