Voxels are the future!

[bigsofty]

This guys kinda mental but the tech on show here is pretty amazing!

[erico]

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

[bigsofty]

Yeah, the guys who covering this is a bit bonkers 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.

[Schranz0r]

You only have to render what is in your vision.
So thats not as many cubes like you guess
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

[erico]

but yeah, it is impressive. I guess I was being a bit too critic.

[Youkaisan]

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.

[bigsofty]

I would imagine the voxels are held and manipulated on the GPU via compute shaders?

[Schranz0r]

Yeah, OpenGL use VBO's and is GPU accelerated.

[D2O]

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(Computerspiel) from 1999

[Moru]

... 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?