Physical interactions on a per-voxel level.Perhaps most importantly, people tend to expect or look forward to voxel engines with the following features: To create anything resembling reality, the world usually also needs: This isn’t even including the building and modification of the game world. These are all systems that operate on the existing data. State serialization and synchronization across a network.Let’s briefly consider what additional capabilities a voxel engine should provide in order to create a game: If you can rasterize (dual contouring), ray cast (Voxlap), splat/frustum trace (Euclideon), sphere march (SDFs/isosurfaces), ray trace (sparse voxel octrees), or somehow get billions of voxels from memory to pixels on your screen, then the most important part is done, right? But why? Defining the ProblemĪ lot of voxel developers base their algorithms on their rendering capabilities. We see jaw-dropping showcases that are sometimes accompanied by hyperbolic claims (“UNLIMITED DETAIL”) and then radio silence. The term “(micro) voxel engine” is basically synonymous with vaporware. It’s exciting both as a developer and to the gaming community to see amazing algorithms produce so much detail and think about the possibilities it brings to virtual worlds.Īnd yet, there’s no commercially available, general-purpose, widely-used voxel engines which games are built on. What is it about voxels that makes people go crazy? Throughout the past decade, there have been SO many developers obsessed with shrinking them down to have as many as possible ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), admittedly including myself.
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