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Main forum => Off Topic => Topic started by: bigsofty on 2019-Aug-23

Title: Voxels are the future!
Post by: bigsofty on 2019-Aug-23
This guys kinda mental but the tech on show here is pretty amazing!




Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: erico on 2019-Aug-23
Very difficult to listen to that guy...

I have seen promises of 100% destructible environment and what not for quite some time now so I´m a bit septic on the subject.
While as a demo scene piece, it sure looks great, but add the in-game elements and you will probably get stupid enemies like minecraft or buggy people like GTA, on the later, such breaks immersion on my side. It also seems only the above ground objects are destructible, doesn´t look like one can dig a hole on this flat, non-mountains, world.

I could go on based on all past fails, but this is just my opinion, maybe people nowadays don´t care much about such details.
Least that is a nice effort and I will be looking into what could come out of it, with not much hope.

Maybe there is a game which could fit and benefit from this engine´s characteristics?
A quick memory access tells me, for example, that this work in progress game here could use it well:
https://cdn.dbolical.com/cache/videos/games/1/68/67316/encode720p_mp4/shadows-of-doubt-august-2019-pre-alpha-gameplay.mp4

Thanks for sharing Bigsofty
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: bigsofty on 2019-Aug-27
Yeah, the guys who covering this is a bit bonkers :S but the tech is very impressive. It does have proper ray traced voxels (not meshes made out of cubes). I am totally dumbfounded how he managed to attach a physics engine on this?!? Your basically looking at a 3 dimentional array of 10cm cubes. Even the smoke and fire, particle systems, seem to be aware of the individual voxels. I pretty sure your looking at millions of voxels here, how the hell is this running in real time?

Love it when a coder does somthing that produces that ,WTF?!?, moment.
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: Schranz0r on 2019-Aug-27
You only have to render what is in your vision.
So thats not as many cubes like you guess :D
Minecraft did the same thing on Cubes, but Java sucks!

And its not the Future of Games.
Voxels are old, the hardware get's better and better, thats it :)
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: erico on 2019-Aug-27
but yeah, it is impressive. I guess I was being a bit too critic. :-[
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: Youkaisan on 2019-Nov-02
Impressive demo.

I'd like to know what hardware the demo runs on. As voxels are using a lot of CPU powers, a regular Pentium or I3 might not work well tho.
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: bigsofty on 2019-Nov-03
I would imagine the voxels are held and manipulated on the GPU via compute shaders?
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: Schranz0r on 2019-Nov-10
Yeah, OpenGL use VBO's and is GPU accelerated.
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: D2O on 2019-Dec-01
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(Computerspiel) (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(Computerspiel)) from 1999 :)
(https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Outcast-simbolo.jpg)
Title: Re: Voxels are the future!
Post by: Moru on 2019-Dec-01
Quote from: erico on 2019-Aug-23
... you will probably get stupid enemies like minecraft or buggy people like GTA...

One way of solving this is by making the enemies zombies. Maybe that is why there is so many survival games with zombies? They are supposed to be stupid and the buggy behaviour works wonders for this. Just look at "7 days to die". Yes, you can build a fort but the zombies will just smash whatever is in the way to get to you. If you dig yourself down into the rock, they will just dig at the rock until they get to you. The environment is fully destructible and if you take out the support for a house on poles, the whole house comes tumbling down. Not as nice as the example video though, it's more like minecraft sand falling down.

Btw, I don't think you could actually change the world in Outcast?