I am a big fan of voxels. :D Do you remember the old game Hexplore? It used a voxel engine called VoxIso. A sample picture:
http://www.vollversion.de/bilder/197_1_full.jpg
It was a very good game at the time. The game world is seen from a top-down, isometric perspective, and the player is allowed to rotate the camera around the center of view. It used real 3D objects created from voxels.
Could somebody tell me some detailed informations about this engine? What was the trick? It was very fast, but of course blocky. It supported animations as well, and two different detail level.
I think it used sprites to render the voxels. :)
0xC0DE at
Re: Hexplore voxel engine
What do you mean with sprites ? As far as I know, sprites are 2D bitmaps. While voxels are 3D. I think the trick here is that they don’t render 3D cubes but 2D squares to represent the voxels. As well as that the voxel models aren’t destructible and at a low-resolution.
trixel at
Hugo Smits said at
What do you mean with sprites ? As far as I know, sprites are 2D bitmaps. While voxels are 3D. I think the trick here is that they don’t render 3D cubes but 2D squares to represent the voxels. As well as that the voxel models aren’t destructible and at a low-resolution.
Oh sorry. :o Yes I mean it used 2d squares as you mentioned. But i do not think that the low resolution and the undestructibility was the only reason that is was fast, and good. This game was the only, who applied voxels for all objects in the game and not for terrains. Sorry, Voxelstein as well, but hexplore was released in 1998.
So it is interesting that these kind of rendering approach are dead, because todays CPU are more faster than in 1998. Your engine is awesome Hugo, it has a lot of similarity with this aproach.
Scott_AW at
That engine for hexplore would be nice to play with. Aside from making your own engine, theres not much variety out there for those who can't code in c.
0xC0DE at
trixel said at
Hugo Smits said at
What do you mean with sprites ? As far as I know, sprites are 2D bitmaps. While voxels are 3D. I think the trick here is that they don’t render 3D cubes but 2D squares to represent the voxels. As well as that the voxel models aren’t destructible and at a low-resolution.
Oh sorry. :o Yes I mean it used 2d squares as you mentioned. But i do not think that the low resolution and the undestructibility was the only reason that is was fast, and good. This game was the only, who applied voxels for all objects in the game and not for terrains. Sorry, Voxelstein as well, but hexplore was released in 1998.
So it is interesting that these kind of rendering approach are dead, because todays CPU are more faster than in 1998. Your engine is awesome Hugo, it has a lot of similarity with this aproach.
I mean the resolution of the voxel models. I don’t think any of them are bigger then 64x64x64 (opposite to Ken’s 1024x1024x512 worlds or 256x256x256 models, I call Hexplore low-res).
Also this wasn’t the only game to apply voxels models for all objects. Ken’s games (Blood and Shadow Warrior did this as well and where released before Hexplore). Although one might argue the enemies count as ‘objects’ too.
It’s not too weird these rendering approaches are dead, considering they have some really blocky results (unless you can render voxels at 1 pixel per voxel, which requires some serious ram and CPU).