Looking for good voxel articles...

[Conan]

As you can see above the Phantom wrote a Voxel engine but can't share the source. A few hints & suggestions would help though. He also did a demo which ran on PocketPC which looks very like the above shots exclusing the moving objects.

I tried writing a mesh / polygon based landscape with generated terrain ( ie: no height map neded ) which proved to be too slow once I made the map really big so the voxel approach is the way to go so I'm watching this thread with interest.

The level of detail in Jacco's demo is way above what I achieved and I never even tackled reflections.

[MirekCz]

Conan:leve of detail in voxel engines is always higher, but they tend to have some nasty problems especially when camera is close to landscape.

Main problem with voxel engine is stability... it doesn't look right when you move... it can be seen very well in phantom's game. It's hard to make a nice texture-mapped voxel engine that doesn't make you feel very much like "eee.. it's shaking"

but voxels are very cheap to draw and therefore on low end systems they're the perfect 3d landscape for many things...

alternative is heightmap based polygon terrain engine.. with some lod and v.fast texture mappers it should work just fine... althrought slower then voxel esp on arm cpus.

[Robotbeat]

[Phantom]

[DillRye]

Phantom, I didnt read into the Novalogic patent yet, but do you think they will go after developers such as yourself?

[randall]

Thats an excellent article.

Its kind of like the PostMortem articles at Gamasutra (Game Developer Magazine), except it offers more in depth detail about their decisions and the technology.

This covers alot of area that developers must deal with on a daily basis (modulation is important), as it is a constant struggle to keep the balance of speed and [visual/audio] quality. Its not easy, whether it is voxel, poly or tile.

I didn't notice anything that was specific about Novalogics patent though.

I've only played a few of Novalogics games. F22 was badass, as you could zoom between canyon walls or soar up through the upper atmosphere.

Comanche sucked though- Jane's Longbow 2 was superior in its gameplay and technical accuracy. Longbow only lacked terrain detail but made up for it in depth. Nothing like trying to bring your copter into control as your tail prop gets knocked out, forcing you into a rapidly spinning spiral.

[Phantom]

I don't think so. I asked Appeal about this and they said that they didn't make any arrangements either, and they had quite a bit more exposure than the average PPC developer.

(I was replying to DillRye )

[Dan East]

[Robotbeat]

Outcast: Sweet looking game, though! And all in software! They were doing this in software (focus-blur, even!) well before games like SplinterCell and others had to have high-end hardware! Wow. This game is pretty sweet-sounding. I am downloading the demo now.

[Dave H]

[T¹]

[v0101]

A book called Black Art of 3D Game Programming by Andre La Mothe has a whole chapter about voxel graphics. I haven't read through that chapter yet, but it looks good. He also provides complete code examples in C.

[Guest]

[v0101]

[T¹]