Voxelstein 3D!

[Micmu]

No mention of Novalogic titles?

I mentioned one

 

[MetalCraze]

I could never figure out this voxel stuff. I get the idea that voxels enable you to render certain 3D objects quicker than using polygons, allowing games to work without the use of 3D acceleration. But how does a 3 dimensional grid of these voxels make such a big difference in processing? How does it work?

Voxel is a pixel that is positioned in a 3d space and has height and width (hence the name - volumetric pixel). Unlike with polygons where you could control only their vertices (well until pixel shaders appeared) you can directly control every pixel in a given voxel-based object (which has a bigger drawback than anything else - read below). Voxels however don't support textures (which is pretty logical, being single pixels and all) so the illusion of the textured object with them was simply created by giving each single voxel a colour. This and also an easier animating of the polygonal object (where you move the whole polygons instead of moving object pixel by pixel) plus voxels being generally resource hogs rendered solely by CPU as vcard manufacturers never tried supporting them (for the reasons above) are the reasons that led to voxels being forgotten. They did a nice job creating 3d graphics when 3d accelerators (the things that are called videocards now - man do I feel old) weren't (widely) available.

One of my most favorite games that uses voxels - Blade Runner (which is a great non-linear adventure which perfectly adds to the movie and the book)

I would've wished Westwood used smaller voxels, but oh well - the characters look pretty nice anyway.

 

[Fez]

At the time there were a lot of very nice looking voxel-based games. Often the terrain on large maps would be generated that way.

 

[crufty]

in 1995, voxel = hi res, polygon = low res. Now with bumpmaping / shaders etc voxels are the betamax of gfx. technically superior at the time but shoved aside by mass market.

actually displacement mapping can be thought of what voxels result in...bump map + color value = voxel.

the speed up is in how the math works. back in the day you had to paint each pixel, so voxels gave you more detail @ same cpu cost. But then gfx accelerators showed up, and then to paint the screen you stuff the buffers with instructions and the gpu does the rest. i knew some cats who claimed that voxels were infinitely superior to polygons...the detail they were able to do 10 years ago is about where gfx cars are today. but...*shrug* polygons it is.

http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Voxel_Polygons.shtml