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zionist gamer posted:Voxels aren't out of commission yet, there's a company working on a UE4 implementation (with an already-made Unity version). They're not going out of commission; they already did. They're currently coming back.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:45
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Elliotw2 posted:I like that all the weapon graphics are stolen from Doom, while the vehicle hud looks kinda like it's from Wing Commander. These aren't really the same kind of voxels seen in these videos, however. The voxels seen here have their values directly interpreted (in this case, color), and drawn as a single square. In the case of Cryengine or Minecraft, the voxels aren't directly seen; they're instead drawn as polygons. These are still voxels (they're still elements in an ordered three-dimensional grid, whose position is inferred based on their neighbors), but they're not voxels in the sense of computer graphics voxels.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:48
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Zaphod42 posted:Careful though. You can't compare a demoscene video to a game directly. Resident Evil 2 N64 had an interesting method of dealing with quality in scenes with lots of enemies. It dropped the resolution for more enemies. It also fit a 2 disc game with FMVs onto a n64 cartridge. It's an interesting game to study.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:50
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The resolution changing thing is actually super popular again. The new Wipeout games, as well as Halo and the UE3 games on console, will dynamically change the resolution to make sure that the games run at their target frame rate the entire time. UE3 can even support this on the PC, though only UT3 has it implemented.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:53
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Elliotw2 posted:The resolution changing thing is actually super popular again. The new Wipeout games, as well as Halo and the UE3 games on console, will dynamically change the resolution to make sure that the games run at their target frame rate the entire time. UE3 can even support this on the PC, though only UT3 has it implemented. NVidia also just released a new version of AA that seems to kinda be scaling AA on demand, which is kinda similar.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:59
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voxels will never take over, cube-square law 2 stronk
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Oct 29, 2014 18:00
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Hey, guys, got a little piece of history for you. In 1996, Otakon released a Doom II wad as sort of a playable promotion for their event--play as Priss from Bubblegum Crisis and fight off possessed nerds. Strikes me as kind of counterintuitive to be killing off your attendants, but whatever. It's got a whole bunch of custom graphics, though since it's 1996 the quality is obviously kind of scrappy. The map is mostly a recreation of the Otakon layout at the time, though with like half the texturing and some creative interpretation of concepts like "scale" and "proportion". The original wad is actually kind of broken, since it was made in only a few weeks. The Dehacked was a mess and there were numerous lumps in the wrong place, reading sounds as sprites and vice-versa, which is fine for ye olde vanillae Doome but causes modern source ports to poo poo themselves. This is an edited version that fixes up the Dehacked and puts all the lumps in the right places, so it should run fine with everything. https://www.dropbox.com/s/p02hnn54lomjv4b/otakon.wad Enjoy, lads. TerminusEst13 fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 18:09
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TerminusEst13 posted:Hey, guys, got a little piece of history for you. Can somebody post some screenshots?
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Oct 29, 2014 18:13
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Zaphod42 posted:Can somebody post some screenshots?    EDIT: 
The Kins fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 18:18
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poo poo. I think that was like the first custom Doom WAD I'd downloaded.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:54
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Is that the same as the one in the archives? http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/m-o/otakondm.zip
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Oct 29, 2014 19:05
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Nope. Like I said, it's an edited version to work in modern source ports without issues. Unless you mean it's the same base Otakon-promotion wad, in which case yes. I only checked ZDoom and Zandro, though, so it might not work with Odamex or something.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:13
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Segmentation Fault posted:These aren't really the same kind of voxels seen in these videos, however. The voxels seen here have their values directly interpreted (in this case, color), and drawn as a single square. In the case of Cryengine or Minecraft, the voxels aren't directly seen; they're instead drawn as polygons. These are still voxels (they're still elements in an ordered three-dimensional grid, whose position is inferred based on their neighbors), but they're not voxels in the sense of computer graphics voxels. Came back to ask this. I learned about voxels on a 3D graphics unit at uni, and always thought of them in the context of medical scans, where you need to be able to convey the volume of an object for slicing and diving inside the image. I've always wondered what it would be like to apply this to games, but voxel use seems to be limited to terrain generation, and even then in some cases just to form the basis of a mesh (as you pointed out). Imagine a game where everything has volume, and what the implications for collision detection and physics would be. No more worlds made out of shiny cardboard cut outs. No more cameras passing through characters and scenery. Everything would be destroyable and malleable.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:57
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EvilGenius posted:Came back to ask this. I learned about voxels on a 3D graphics unit at uni, and always thought of them in the context of medical scans, where you need to be able to convey the volume of an object for slicing and diving inside the image. Why imagine when voxelstein 3D exists? 
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Oct 29, 2014 20:01
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EvilGenius posted:Came back to ask this. I learned about voxels on a 3D graphics unit at uni, and always thought of them in the context of medical scans, where you need to be able to convey the volume of an object for slicing and diving inside the image. Yup, that's the whole point. You could dig through any wall, smash open any box or object, because things would be filled in, they'd be real, instead of right now where they're all just hollow shells with special case logic. Unfortunately actually doing physics calculations on hollow shells is already pushing us to our technical limits, we still can't even do perfect physics with raster graphics and polygon models in real time, much less with voxels. And then the problem with voxels is, what scale? Minecraft's world is essentially made of very very big square voxels. (And the weapons/items, but not the players or monsters) Ideally you'd have voxels be very, very small. Eventually, if moore's law continues, we could have atomic sized voxels and the game would be akin to a proper physics simulation. But that's.... a long, long way away. For now, in order to get playable framerates with good-looking images, you gotta stick with polygons. Using voxels would require the graphical fidelity to look really poo poo (look at how "old" minecraft looks).
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Oct 29, 2014 21:08
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I take it voxelstein is still a bit "special" then?
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Oct 29, 2014 21:09
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3D Dot game heroes is proper voxels and it looks pretty good, but its also got a very limited playfield size, fairly big voxels, and goes for an intentionally retro look in order to pull off the voxels. There's a kickstarter for a game called voxel quest, and while the game sounds really lame (some kinda roguelike? He doesn't even seem to know what he wants to do) the engine looks loving fantastic. I swore it was pre-rendered CG until I really saw the voxels being used in action: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gavan/voxel-quest Probably the best looking modern use of voxels I've ever seen. There was also that minecraft like game where you were more of an adventure RPG, that looked okay but still had pretty big voxels, although smaller than minecraft's I think. But what happened to it? I think it fizzled out. Ace of Spades is an FPS with minecraft like elements, and such a voxel world. It looks pretty garbage but it can be fun, especially if you're into retro shooters. I'll have to check out voxelstein...
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Oct 29, 2014 21:16
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Prenton posted:I take it voxelstein is still a bit "special" then? It's technically impressive, but also really, really goofy, not always intentionally.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:38
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Elliotw2 posted:In a different direction, Novalogic uses voxels heavily in their early simulators, including the first three Delta Force games. That poo poo blew my mind back in the day. I'm still a bit unclear on what voxels are and what they do, but I'm pretty sure they are responsible for the insane view distance in the Delta Force games. It was the first game I recall that you could actually snipe your way to victory. Previously, games had such a limited draw distance that it made it unfeasible. How best to explain voxels to someone who doesn't know what they are? 3D round pixels basically?
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Oct 29, 2014 22:30
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:That poo poo blew my mind back in the day. I'm still a bit unclear on what voxels are and what they do, but I'm pretty sure they are responsible for the insane view distance in the Delta Force games. It was the first game I recall that you could actually snipe your way to victory. Previously, games had such a limited draw distance that it made it unfeasible. Everything in your engine is built out of tiny Minecraft bricks, instead of being defined by its bounding polygons. Whether the bricks are round or cubic or dodecahedral isn't really crucial to the concept of "voxel", neither is how you actually draw them. I doubt they have anything to do with large draw distance considering they make everything ridiculously computationally expensive. AugmentedVision fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 22:36
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AugmentedVision posted:Everything in your engine is built out of tiny Minecraft bricks, instead of being defined by its bounding polygons. Whether the bricks are round or cubic or dodecahedral isn't really crucial to the concept of "voxel", neither is how you actually draw them. I doubt they have anything to do with large draw distance considering they make everything ridiculously computationally expensive. In that case, why would voxels be a selling point for the Delta Force games? Seems like the only reason you would use them would be if you wanted to make things destructable.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:40
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:In that case, why would voxels be a selling point for the Delta Force games? Seems like the only reason you would use them would be if you wanted to make things destructable. Reading this http://tagn.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/delta-force-a-memory-of-voxels/ it sounds like they used it to get better looking terrain than was otherwise possible at the time, and yeah, possibly draw distances somehow. It was probably cheaper to do a quick voxel check for height in specific areas than it was to hold a huge mesh for the whole world at once, for whatever specific reasons. And more importantly back then any textures for a huge ground polygon would have to be stretched to all hell, since video cards back then didn't support big textures. By using voxels, you could effectively create more detailed textures by interpreting the voxels in an area, and coloring it based on those voxels. Usually that would be less efficient, but with the right algorithm you could get a rough estimation pretty drat fast, and the results would be much more richly detailed terrain than you could otherwise render. Lots of people used voxels for terrain, even in cases where it wasn't destructible, because of that. Remember how lovely the ground textures looked in Everquest or N64 games like Mario Kart or Rogue Squadron? HORRIBLE. These days we can megatexture things to hell so it isn't a limitation. TLDR: voxels were sorta like a cheap way to get megatexturing back in the day.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:48
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Well, they did allow you to make things destructable. Grenades in Delta Force, and various missiles and shells in Comanche and Armored Fist would knock holes in buildings and the ground. Delta Force mostly had voxel tech because Novalogic spent years hand coding their voxel engine in x86 assembly.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:48
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:In that case, why would voxels be a selling point for the Delta Force games? Seems like the only reason you would use them would be if you wanted to make things destructable. Because they're kinda cool I guess
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Oct 29, 2014 22:49
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Some wikipedia stuff about the Delta Force devs and the engine. Like most 90's FPS stuff the technology was interesting.quote:Comanche was also the first commercial flight simulation based on voxel technology. NovaLogic used the proprietary Voxel Space engine developed for the company by Kyle Freeman [7](written entirely in Assembly language) to create open landscapes.[8] This rendering technique allowed for much more detailed and realistic terrain compared to simulations based on vector graphics at that time.[5] quote:The original Voxel Space engine was patented in 1996, and first released in software in the 1992 release Comanche Maximum Overkill. The engine was then revamped into Voxel Space 2, and later Voxel Space 32 and used in Armored Fist 3 and Delta Force 2.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:52
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Another example is the vehicles and some random things in Duke Nukem. Those are voxels, but they're not destructible so that wasn't the reason behind it. Just a cheap way of getting fuzzy details versus going with blocky box polygons if that's all you can afford. I guess it probably had something to do with the vehicles moving around in Duke Nukem, too. They probably didn't have support for changing level geometry much other than hard-coded lifts and things like that.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:56
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While I'm bringing up old vehicle games with voxels, the Carmageddon series uses voxels to model all the cars, so that they can truly dynamically deform and reshape realistically, even to the point where the cars can be torn in half. It used regular 3d for the actual playing field, so it didn't age like poo poo either.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:56
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Zaphod42 posted:Another example is the vehicles and some random things in Duke Nukem. Those are voxels, but they're not destructible so that wasn't the reason behind it.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:59
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Zaphod42 posted:Another example is the vehicles and some random things in Duke Nukem. Those are voxels, but they're not destructible so that wasn't the reason behind it. No voxels in Duke (It might be an unfinished debug option somewhere?), but they're used in later build games for stuff like keys and some furniture. They're a neat way of getting round using limited-viewing-angles flat sprites.
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Oct 29, 2014 23:00
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Zaphod42 posted:Another example is the vehicles and some random things in Duke Nukem. Those are voxels, but they're not destructible so that wasn't the reason behind it. Shadow Hog posted:I thought the Build Engine didn't support voxels until Blood or Shadow Warrior. Prenton posted:No voxels in Duke (It might be an unfinished debug option somewhere?), but they're used in later build games for stuff like keys and some furniture. They're a neat way of getting round using limited-viewing-angles flat sprites. Yeah, there are no voxels at all in Duke Nukem 3D. All moving cars etc. were actually implemented using level geometry. Shadow Warrior was the first build game with voxels, Blood came out a couple of weeks later. Elliotw2 posted:While I'm bringing up old vehicle games with voxels, the Carmageddon series uses voxels to model all the cars, so that they can truly dynamically deform and reshape realistically, even to the point where the cars can be torn in half. It used regular 3d for the actual playing field, so it didn't age like poo poo either. Similarly, there are no voxels anywhere in Carmageddon, it's all polygons. This is extremely obvious if you play it with 3dfx hardware acceleration (or use the nGlide wrapper). I believe the reason they had to use sprites for pedestrians etc. in the original was the (at the time) huge number of polygons for each car. The aggressive LoD scaling is also extremely visible at higher resolutions, even at the maximum LoD setting.  Also, cars couldn't get torn in half in the original, that was implemented in Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now 
KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 23:19
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I always thought that the benefit of voxels (in the pre-3D-acceleration days) was that you could create very complex and sprawling shapes — i.e. terrain — with very little data. A km² worth of terrain data could fit in a meg-sized (uncompressed) heightmap and that you could do both LoD and culling very easily on this data before turning it into the actual voxels. The voxels themselves might have been computationally intensive, but you could really cut down on the number of them needed in a way that couldn't be done (as easily) with huge polygon meshes. You could also do away with a lot of the heavy texturing work (and polygon fitting) by… well. not really using textures at all — just colours, and at the time, it would still look better than most other methods. Of course, once 3D acceleration became a thing, none of that was true any more — the meshes and textures could be dumped onto the GPU, thereby bypassing or at least side-loading the whole problem. The other benefits of them potentially allowing for more dynamic environments was just a happy, and largely unused, side-effect.
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Oct 29, 2014 23:55
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I kind of like that the BFG is turned into a "beacon" that "calls an orbital strike". The explanation doesn't really work when there's a non-sky ceiling but still, cool idea. Also the chaingun is given a satisfying fire rate. There are some neat tricks, for the time, in the level itself, like the explosion and collapse of a tunnel (a crusher and some barrels) or the pseudo-3D effect of lowering something on a roof and then seeing (a copy of) it lowered in a room. Also the icon fight you're not actually supposed to fight, just go in, flip a switch, go out and let the monsters accumulate, who cares about them. Props for the ENDOOM screen being honest and accurately calling it a publicity stunt. It's still ugly as sin of course, and the zombie nerd sprites are especially atrocious.
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Oct 30, 2014 00:18
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Hades reminded me that I played that Legend of the Seven Paladins game that used BUILD illegally and I couldn't make it very far in the first level due to these green ninja guys shooting streams of fireballs at me. Also, there's totally a boxed full version of the game because someone on Twitch I watch has a copy and showed it off on stream. I'd love to know if Ken Silverman or anyone else who worked/works for 3DR is aware of this. I'm also wondering if there's any other weird Korean/Taiwanese/Chinese FPS games like Hades or MARS. Would be funny if they decided to illegally use the Quake engine for something. Zeether fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Oct 30, 2014 |
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Oct 30, 2014 02:47
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KozmoNaut posted:Also, cars couldn't get torn in half in the original, that was implemented in Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now It's pretty nuts how they managed to implement that in a game from 1998. Most racing games around that time didn't have damage modeling that complex. 
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Oct 30, 2014 03:05
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Tippis posted:I always thought that the benefit of voxels (in the pre-3D-acceleration days) was that you could create very complex and sprawling shapes — i.e. terrain — with very little data. A km² worth of terrain data could fit in a meg-sized (uncompressed) heightmap and that you could do both LoD and culling very easily on this data before turning it into the actual voxels. The voxels themselves might have been computationally intensive, but you could really cut down on the number of them needed in a way that couldn't be done (as easily) with huge polygon meshes. I don't think it's really even accurate to call the engines used in Comanche and Delta Force "voxel" engines. More a quick way to render a height field by exploiting some short cuts that they allow. The algorithms they used have nothing in common with the voxel rendering in the Build engine, and even less to do with fully volumetric engines that are being produced today.
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Oct 30, 2014 06:02
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I totally don't remember grenades/explosives being able to deform buildings in Delta Force.
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Oct 30, 2014 06:29
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Voxlstein is interesting, though limited to being able to stab through walls. In my fantasy game, the world is made up of voxels, perhaps half or a quarter as big as Voxelstein. There are no textures to save on processing time - you just use the voxels on the surface to draw the textures. The voxels are small enough that shaders (e.g. displacement maps) could be represented in real three-dimesnions, so no shaders to fake 3D surfaces required. Reflectivity effects would still be required. This still leaves us with something hugely wasteful - with surface based modeling you only see 50% of the surfaces in the scene. With voxels you're only seeing a tiny fraction of the voxels in the scene. These need to be culled somehow if the processor has any hope of smothe animation. A lot of time and effort has been spent culling things that don't need to processed in surface based modeling (you could argue it's John Carmack's entire career), culminating in graphics hardware that does the job out-the-box. There's been no such research in voxel rendering that I know of. Each voxel would have physical properties - weight, and 'stickiness' I.e. what force it takes to detach a voxel from it's neighbour, on each surface. Imagine a brick wall, where the masonry is the weak point, shattering bricks everywhere if something hits it. This would be a lot cooler than a faked effect, especially given that it applies to every object in the game. This wouldn't just be a gimmick in a Hulk or Godzilla 'destroy everything' game. It would create an immersion, a feeling that the game world is real and solid. Creating water would simply be a matter of giving your voxels the right properties. Waves, splashes, deplacement would all emerge, rather than having to fake every single property. This is my dream anyway. I just wish I was talented enough to be able to code it!
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Oct 30, 2014 09:30
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I vaguely remember the first game I saw with some kind of terrain deforming. Too bad it was Nature Fawn Killers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPlswnKqrkY at 8:50 you can see it. Even water appears if the crater is deep enough.
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Oct 30, 2014 11:39
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You poor bastard. It was 2d, but Worms blew my mind when I blew up a hill.
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Oct 30, 2014 11:59
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laserghost posted:There was one Russian FPS which used voxels heavily, ZAR (or Zone of Artificial Resources) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQP9cm5Us8k. I used to play the 3-level demo quite a lot, and apparently the game had quite a following in it's motherland, with LAN tournaments scene etc. I remember playing this and another game by the same devs called... Madspace? and having a lot of trouble just getting them to run, and then when I finally did get Madspace to run it was a boring piece of poo poo so I quit long before seeing any of the Build-esque gimmick stages I wanted to see.
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Oct 30, 2014 12:22
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