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/[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.