Voxelstein 3D is way better than Fez >:( Fez doesn't have a dopefish 8) Also, Fez's maps are monotonous.
Edited by ConsistentCallsign at
Spacerat at
Re: Fez - 3D voxel platformer
Hm.. why do they invent a new word for voxels ? Anyway, the game idea is great :) Just the 3D-look doesnt look very appealing.. Also its a waste to code a voxel engine to render a couple of cubes that could already be rendered faster by the earliest 3D accelerators in polygons..
ConsistentCallsign at
Spacerat said at
Hm.. why do they invent a new word for voxels ?
Because the word voxel gives pro-poly people negative connotations. Voxels just doesn't sell :'(
Spacerat said at
Anyway, the game idea is great :)
I strongly disagree. Voxelstein 3D is a great game idea 8) Fez is just a really bad-attempt-at-making-money-idea :P
Edited by ConsistentCallsign at
Maren at
Do you even know what the word "modesty" means? ;D
The game's artwork is most unoriginal (mario bros anyone?), the character is flat (why on earth? it's a voxel engine for hell's sake!) and too stupid-looking (just like everything japanese), the world is not deformable and the music fitting but boring.
A poorly carried out good idea.
JonoF at
Now that is a clever game concept. I wish I'd thought of it.
esuvs at
What makes you guys think it's even a voxel engine? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything in that video which couldn't be accomplished with regular polygon graphics (with the texture filtering mode set to linear). I agree that's it's visually similar to VoxLap, but that doesn't mean anything. I don't see any destructible environments, for example.
Still, it looks like a damn cool game :-)
0xC0DE at
esuvs said at
What makes you guys think it's even a voxel engine? Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything in that video which couldn't be accomplished with regular polygon graphics (with the texture filtering mode set to linear). I agree that's it's visually similar to VoxLap, but that doesn't mean anything. I don't see any destructible environments, for example.
Still, it looks like a damn cool game :-)
voxels don't always have to be destructible. For example the voxel models that were used in the build engine games (blood,shadow warrior) weren't destructible. A voxel is volume element that represents a value in a grid in 3D space. If you would like to visualize such point, you can use whatever you want to. Sprites,polygons,whatever.
So the fact that this game may be drawn with polygons and isn't destructible, doens't exclude it from being a voxel engine.
esuvs at
Hugo Smits said at
voxels don't always have to be destructible. For example the voxel models that were used in the build engine games (blood,shadow warrior) weren't destructible. A voxel is volume element that represents a value in a grid in 3D space. If you would like to visualize such point, you can use whatever you want to. Sprites,polygons,whatever.
So the fact that this game may be drawn with polygons and isn't destructible, doesn't exclude it from being a voxel engine.
Agreed, and from what I've seen in the video it *could* be accomplished with a voxel engine like VoxLap. However, I don't see any evidence of this - it could equally well be achieved with a polygon engine. A voxel engine would give no advantages in this particular case.
Put it this way, given that it could be either I would assume it's a polygon engine because they are simply more widely used. However, if they did want to take the voxel route (and it's advantages, such as destructible scenery) the game would be even cooler :-)
counting_pine at
That's one awesome-looking game. It seems to be a static environment, but it does use voxelly-type techniques. The developers have a blog, this post elaborates on things a bit: http://www.kokoromi.org/fez/ask-renaud/
I seem to remember reading about something similar a while back, think it might have been polygons though - you had 3D levels, but you could choose an arbitrary viewing angle, and then "squash" that into 2D and use that as the level. Wish I could remember what it was called...
esuvs at
Actually I concede - it is using voxels (well, they call them trixels). Watching the video it moved too fast, I though the smallest 'unit' was the 16x16x16 block (which as I said, could simply be a cube with a linearly interpolated texture on it. But looking at this screenshot (especially the vase) it is quite clear that the 16x16x16 block is not the smallest unit:
It's the same as the one counting_pine presented but has a couple of interesting screenshots at the bottom where you can see how the voxel object is polygonised.
counting_pine at
Thanks for that link. Besides the added images, one of the comments mentioned the game I'd been thinking of: Crush.
Spacerat at
Thanks, the link is really informative ;D Now it just looks like a conventional polygon-renderer, that is just rendering the iso-surface of the voxel-volume. The good thing is, thats very fast as long as you have a low-detailed voxel-volume to convert (that's why the game looks so blocky) but once you get high-detailed voxel volumes, its hard without level-of-detail. The attached screenshot shows an hi-detailed example with LOD. In such a case, not many polygons are able to be merged and also the LOD boundaries are visible. The amount of triangles has been about 1M.
esuvs at
Spacerat said at
Thanks, the link is really informative ;D Now it just looks like a conventional polygon-renderer, that is just rendering the iso-surface of the voxel-volume. The good thing is, thats very fast as long as you have a low-detailed voxel-volume to convert (that's why the game looks so blocky) but once you get high-detailed voxel volumes, its hard without level-of-detail. The attached screenshot shows an hi-detailed example with LOD. In such a case, not many polygons are able to be merged and also the LOD boundaries are visible. The amount of triangles has been about 1M.
Well modern graphics cards can handle a lot of triangles - it's high batch counts and state changes that cause problems. In my engine (which uses marching cubes) I get about 300,000 triangles and it is still fast.
In the case of Fez there is a lot of repeated geometry - each 16x16x16 'trile' appears many times in the scene. So this makes the rendering a lot easier (and reduces the memory). If it's a good game then maybe voxels will become more popular again?!