You can render voxels with GPUs as well.If I am not wrong voxels ar every CPU dependant.
Which could be the benefits of new APIs for voxels?
Better CPU use? CPU-GPU mixed voxel engines? Any of them and something new?
PD. I just want a voxel Oucast HD (and have nothing against the HD remake)
same as minecraft then.Resogun voxels are really just small polygon cubes though, aren't they?
No.Old-style voxel games like that Commanche helicopter sim whatsitscalled, Outcast and the like drew voxels like a solid color point sprite. Not as polygons.
No, he just means that the voxels are drawn as point sprites, although determining what to render on screen is achieved via raycasting.No.
They raycasted the heightfield.
To get it done in reasonable speed games used optimization method called wave surfing.
http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Re...rt_2_Rendering_the_Landscapes_Structure.shtml
Yes, indeed. Thank you.No, he just means that the voxels are drawn as point sprites, although determining what to render on screen is achieved via raycasting.
How would you bilinear filter a voxel? They're solid color, so there's no color difference to interpolate between...But that was an awesome link (even the page's presentation, color scheme etc. are lovely)
It doesn't look like sprites so much when the voxels are bilinear filtered.
No, he just means that the voxels are drawn as point sprites, although determining what to render on screen is achieved via raycasting.
How would you bilinear filter a voxel? They're solid color, so there's no color difference to interpolate between...
Pixels are solid color as well, and you can still bilinear interpolate between them. Bilinear filtering between color voxels is the same operation as bilinear filtering a 3d texture (bilinear filter two xy (2x2) layers and then linear filter them together by the z).How would you bilinear filter a voxel? They're solid color, so there's no color difference to interpolate between...
We also had a voxel based terrain engine in our Nokia N-GAGE game Pathway to Glory (2004). It used similar technique as this "wave surfing". Basically the algorithm goes through the screen from down to up one vertical scanline at a time, and renders textured line segments. Actually we rendered from right to left and then transposed the whole screen (it was more CPU cache efficient this way). Even the 100 MHz NGAGE ARM CPU (it didn't even have a floating point unit) managed to render a voxel terrain at 30 fps. Only the internal (texture line) loop was written with assembler (everything else in the graphics engine, except for scan line blitters was pure C).No.
They raycasted the heightfield.
To get it done in reasonable speed games used optimization method called wave surfing.
http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Re...rt_2_Rendering_the_Landscapes_Structure.shtml
We also had a voxel based terrain engine in our Nokia N-GAGE game Pathway to Glory (2004). It used similar technique as this "wave surfing". Basically the algorithm goes through the screen from down to up one vertical scanline at a time, (...)
(...) However four degrees of freedom (inherent limitation of "wave surfing") is quite limited for modern games (no camera rolling), so this algorithm wouldn't be good enough for most cases.
Not sure that's an absolute truth in games (not that there are very many voxel games around, really); in Outcast the ground is essentially a texturemap. Definitely not colored according to height, intensity or such. In the medical field, colored voxels in an MRI scan correspond to the inner structures of the subject having been scanned, and so on...Voxels generally don't have color values but some scalar value like intensity or heightfield.