Voxel Tech Demo

http://www.humblebundle.com, Inspired by Minecraft, Introversion developer Chris Delay began investigating voxels. He built a voxel engine, incorporated some procedural generation experiments, and toyed with physics. The results of his brewing are on display in this Windows-only voxel destruction prototype, which demonstrates the interesting interactions made possible by voxels.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• http://www.humblebundle.com
• Uplink
• (video
• Game)
• Introversion
• Software
• subersion
• Crayon
• Physics
• Deluxe
• Aquaria
• DEFCON
• Darwinia
• Multiwinia

[EmoryMDotCom]

All the 'voxels aren't designed for' stuff is irrelevant - these aren't voxels, they're cubes. Voxels are constrained to grid positions and don't rotate... Using the word voxel is still good, though, because the layperson doesn't know better.

[JTickett]

@Broden124 Sorry for mass text, but "Voxels not designed for..." bothers me a lot. 2 questions:

Who do you think "designed" the voxel?

Why does their original intent have any impact on what other coders want to do?

I mean no disrespect, but from one coder to another: THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX! (no pun intended)

[AtomicSushi92130]

That's amazing ! This is an engine that any developper can buy and make a game with it, right ?

[pedenulle]

so when does it hit infdev?

[Error52QFG]

Crashing the demo was fun.

[fishchunksgaming]

I wish when you blow up the bottom the rest fell...That would have made the tech demo amazing!

[Lordofcookiejars]

Can we stop arguing whether this is is voxels or not and just agree that this is cool and has a lot of potential? :)

[RFC3514]

Indeed, calling these "voxels" is a bit misleading, as is saying that Minecraft uses voxels. Both define their base models as a 3D grid of cubes (which is how voxels in general work) but they render the images using polygons, and allow elements to move unconstrained by the original grid. Just as you can't "rotate a pixel", you would not be able to rotate a voxel. A cubic polyhedron isn't a voxel, just as a square polygon isn't a pixel.

[JTickett]

Recent update from Humble Bundle... source code for Introversion games avaliable! :D also SVN repository access!!!! *nerdgasm* Really hope this source code is avaliable, making it open to the worlds developers was a fantastic idea. Open-source FTW! Come on people... dive in there and get involved. My first thought... lets make Uplink a multiplayer!

+ about CPU/GPU power: Do most systems have processors dedicated to physics processing or utilise PhysX? In <5 years it could be common technology.

[JTickett]

@QuininSane I think Broden124 misunderstood the comment he was replying to (that the terrain would be tiny tiny voxels simulating realistic looking matter), and I misunderstood what was meant about why it wouldnt be made in mainstream gaming. I thought he was saying its not possible, but I get that 'mainstream gaming' only invests in ideas that are tried and tested (recycled) ideas because they arent risky investments, innovation usually only comes from the indie developers these days.

[JTickett]

@QuininSane one point in the video it says 69216 quads... divide that by 6 and you have 11,536 which I thought should be the amount of cubes but thats not right cause the value changes throughout the vid. As one cube is added at 0:16 it increases by 4, because 2 sides are in contact, so its one mesh that breaks into seperate cubes when needed. Explains why theres odd numbers too. So in theory a detailed box 1000x1000 'voxels' wide would be processed as just 1 cube until broken apart. I think :P

[JTickett]

@QuininSane All down to efficiency of code. Realistically its never going to be 100% perfectly optimised code, theres always room for improvement. But strangely, it does struggle to compute a smaller amount of cubes than I had expected. Not that I could do better, I'm just curious why that is... I wouldve thought cubes (having very simple collision geometry) would need little processing. Its just 'gravity' and an outwards force from an explosion, on simple collision boxes with no texture :/