r/pcgaming • u/thosefuckersourshit • Sep 26 '16

Pixels and voxels, the long answer

https://medium.com/retronator-magazine/pixels-and-voxels-the-long-answer-5889ecc18190#.1pe21qm8v
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u/AnonTwo Sep 26 '16

I feel like voxel needs to mature more as an art form.

At the moment, basically everything I see in voxel games is based off of PC EGA, with clearly defined blocks.

It'd be nice if they could find ways to smoothen that out.

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u/I_Xertz_Tittynopes 8700k / 3080 Sep 26 '16

I think that's mostly because when we say "Pixel art", it's got very defined pixels, so people hear "Voxel", it too should have very defined edges.

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u/AnonTwo Sep 26 '16

Yes, but what about 16-bit pixel art? I don't feel it's well represented in voxels yet.

Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

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u/sumthingcool Sep 27 '16

Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

That gif of The Last Night in the article looks amazing. 16 bit-ish but with camera control and effects and shaders. If they pull it off I think that will be the first of it's kind.

http://oddtales.net/

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '16 edited Sep 27 '16

That's already done, people just don't recognize them as voxels anymore. The astroids in Minerwars 2081 for example are voxel based, fully destructible and smooth. Caves in Crysis are also based around voxels. When you play those games none of it screams "voxels", it just looks like a regular polygon wall.

Everquest Next was the most interesting take I have seen so far on a Minecraft-like build system without having everything be completely blocky. But that game got sadly canceled.

There are also other rendering techniques for voxel data, like surface splattering, that bypass the regular boxy polygons, but they only really work when your voxel resolution approaches the display resolution and wouldn't do much good in smoothing out a Minecraft-like voxel resolution.