I'm in the middle of a little research in to a game engine I'm expecting to write in the coming months. There are several things that are already down and that we are definitely going to use like Voxel sprites and a grid based map format, much like Tomb Raider rather then Cubes5 or even BUILGRID, as well as many other things. But the one thing I have been asked to do is something I've never seen or heard of before. Is it possible to have Translucent Voxels? The project is using Ken's Voxel format either vox or kvx depending on which one is more suited to what we need.
Awesoken at
Re: Another Voxel Question
Translucence might work well in something like Scott_AW's Voxel Dungeon Crawler. The first step is to find a list of potentially visible wall blocks, using an algorithm similar to a Wolf3D raycaster. For translucence, you would then need to sort these blocks in back to front order before rendering. VDC does not sort blocks because Evaldraw uses a Z-buffer to resolve depth issues. You can't rely on the Z-buffer for translucense though. You would have to write your own splat-style (i.e. rendering back-to-front with overdraw) voxel sprite renderer, since I have not written one that handles translucence. If you don't mind limiting your engine to 4dof, you could gain some speed and write a renderer similar to my old SLABSPRI.