Now THIS is a cool 3d engine.

[rodekill]

Voxels are back

[Flippy_D]

Ooooh, how nifty.

[TheYak]

Ken Silverman?  I could be wrong but wasn't he the guy who made Ken's Labyrinth?

[Shattered Sponge]

Yup, Yak; and he creted the Build engine, too - browse around his site and you find loadsa info.

Wow.  I hadn't seen this in a while, but it looks much, MUCH better then when I last looked.

[Hobbes]

Ooooh, then someone can finally make Outcast 2.

Looking good!

[Ciro Durán]

It's Ken Silverman! :o,  w00t, no wonder why that engine looks so  damn pretty cool.

[Trapezoid]

Heh, fun.
I completely leveled the place.


Then I got creative with the scorch marks:

(That's an S, not a 5.)

[Nellie]

Holy crap, blowing up the environment is fun.  I'd give my left armpit to see rocket launchers have that effect in Unreal Tournament.

And all that from a 500 measly kilobytes download, too.

[Ghormak]

If that thing had realistic physics it'd be the coolest thing ever.

[Snake]

AG5?2?!!

hehe

Sweet stuff, thanks Rode, downloading now...


--Snake

[MrColossal]

wow Scid and i went on a "what the fuck are voxels?" crusade a few years ago and i found his page, i would love to know what games would be like if voxels were chosen over polygons...

i emailed him and asked him how it was going and if we'd ever get to peek at the new engine and he said soon.

2 years soon

downloading now

eric

[BOYD1981]

something like this perhaps...


it's a screenie from Outcast btw...

[Flippy_D]

Ehm. Dude. Impressive.

[auhsor]

Heh, that looks cool. Gonna download now.

Hmm, i don't really know what voxels are, but i think i got an idea...

[BOYD1981]

they're cars...

[Hobbes]

Argh!

Seeing that screenshot makes me want to install Outcast on my machine again... that game was just *too* good to be true.

And is also available on The Underdogs, if I'm not mistaken....

So, yeah, voxels are great. The only problem is that they're not accelerated with today's 3D hardware. This was one of the reasons why Outcast never really became a hype. Lots of computers back then couldn't play it properly. That, and the absurdly low resolution, of course.

[Nellie]

Yeah, Outcast was amazing.  But why oh why did they stick in that ridiculous LESN FLAER?

[Krynge]

? I've never seen anything like this before!!! a 500k file inflates into over 120mb, and the worlds look awesome!!! How is this done without solids (polys I mean)

[TheYak]

Voxel stands for volume-pixel.  In typical 3D, we have points connected to make lines and 3 lines together forming a triangle (Of course, some 3d apps don't use only triangles but 3D games do).  The problem with this is that for a realistic scene we need 3 sets of coordinates (in x,y,z) for every triangle and then attributes for the triangle (Texture, alpha, masking, shadowing, bumpmap, environment map, etc.)  It adds up to a lot of data for even the description of a simple box.  

With volume-pixels, each "pixel" is not one "dot" on your monitor but rather a 3-dimensional cube.  Imagine a landscape made out of building blocks and you get the general idea.  Since each voxel is a small part of the whole, it can be assigned simply 1 color based on the color scheme of the whole.  It requires only 1 set of coordinates - placing this "block" in 3d-space.  The amount of data is reduced greatly and any shadowing or other lighting effects are generated to the map as a whole.  The downside to voxels is that you can only be as detailed as the number of voxels generated, depending of the size of them.  So, if you've got decent hardware CPU-wise and memory-wise then a modern voxel app can generate a nicely detailed scene.  

[Hobbes]

Yeah, Outcast was amazing.  But why oh why did they stick in that ridiculous LESN FLAER?

True. But in that game, it didn't really bother me that much.

Did you hear Outcast 2 got cancelled? Very, very big loss for the gaming community there. Appeal is bankrupt, and the project is lost. For more info: http://www.outcastii.net/eng/index_eng.php