@asdfzxc: Yes, but they haven't been put to creative use very often until recently. Minecraft showed the potential for voxels even at a very low resolution in a destructable environment.

I like how everybody here talks about voxels like they're some kind of undeveloped, next-gen technology. You know what VOXLAP is based on? The voxel engine from Blood, a Duke3D engine game from 1997. Many of the models bundled with Slab6, such as the Duke Nukem model, are taken directly from Blood. So yes, voxels have been around a long time and they have seen plenty of commercial use.

A WWI-style FPS game built in this engine would solve AoS's climbing-single-block dilemma :)

@Kaede: Seemed a little too cartoony to me, but yes, I'm aware of holograms (I'm assuming that's what that was?) Still, that doesn't violate what I said... it was not, in fact, a two-dimensional screen.

That doesn't stop me from wanting one of those instead of my monitor, though.

>There will NEVER be true 3D images

Nevermind, Japan already has it.

@Sue: A fully justifiable standpoint.

Just remember, on a two-dimensional screen there is no such thing as a three-dimensional image. There are merely ways to make two-dimensional images appear to have depth.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh.
... Yeah I don't know too much about this stuff
I just like playing the games.

@Sue: It's a voxel engine, it just has a slightly different render method that allows the 2-D images to be projected onto the blocks. Really, the render method for voxels can be just about anything, provided the programmer knows how to code the method (or where to get the code from). The biggest tell-tale of a voxel engine is all the objects conforming to a "box" grid. If objets can be stacked in a straight line vertically and in both horizontal directions, then it's probably voxel.

Minecraft is not voxels I dont think.
Uses java and you can edit the skins in paint if you wanted, but heck if I know anything right.

@Kaede: Lol, I'll build stuff almost entirely because it looks pretty. I'll keep in mind basic stuff like keeping the mobs out and making a safe exit so I don't get jumped leaving my digs, but even when I'm building something useful (rail line somewhere far away and interesting!) I'll make sure it looks nice too (make the rail line perfectly straight and level, and make the bridges look nice instead of boring rows of cobble), even if the finished product will take a lot longer because of it.

Ironically, I still don't actually own a full copy of Minecraft... too stingy, I guess.

Minecraft isn't voxels though, is it?

The game itself looks like it'd be Minecraft 2.0 New and Improved!™

Instead of being blocky, it now has flavor.

anything made with voxels is a minecraft clone, even the ones made before it

it makes me think about voxels, it also reminds me a lot of clonk.de, it does not use voxels(at least, i don't think the 3D one does), but it is still a really good game, but most of them are 2D,i dont think the 3D has came out yet

I'd only really be interested in it if it had some kind of survival mode. I'm not nearly autistic enough to really be creative with building a boring structure that doesn't do anything.

That's why everything I build in AoS is square and has purpose.

For sure.

The construction looks a bit complicated, but there is so much more you can make with that

Yeah it looks really nice. Too bad this didn't start like 9 months ago, it would have blown minecraft beta out of the fucking water, even in pre-alpha. Minecraft just has too huge of a following now and this will sadly be considered a minecraft clone and probably shunned by most of the community. It'll attract hipsters though, since minecraft is so "mainstream" now.

Thinking of this makes me want Dippin-Dots for some reason now. Whee.

Anyways, I love the visuals already, reminds me of Wind Waker's cel shading.

@Kaede: Yeah, but voxels are really just a way of computing a bunch of floating points. The traditional image of a voxel is a cube, a sort of 3-D pixel (I'm betting "voxel" is a combination of "vitual object" and "pixel," or something similar), but it really could be anything. The gun models are rendered in-game using a bunch of colored squares facing the player, basically a bunch of sprites.

How would that even work? What would go in the spaces between the spheres? I'd say dodecahedrons maybe.

Think of voxels as a 3d grid of points equidistant from each other. They aren't necessarily any shape. They can be rendered as anything, which is usually a square, cube, circle, or sphere.

Yep. Any shape really.

Can't voxels also be rendered in spheres?

I'm basing my guess off of Slab6, btw.

To be fair, that IS a pre-alpha screening and probably a placeholder for actual particles.

it looks kind of weird, it probably will be a pretty decent game. i just think the dust particles look really dumb

Well by that logic then, 1337101, wouldn't pixels also be randomly shaped? No, they're all squares. You'd figure all voxels would be cubes, basically 3D representations of a pixel.

As you can all tell, this is a pretty new concept to me, and either I'm just not grasping it, or it just doesn't make any correlation at all.

Yeah, it looks like the voxels are represented as seemingly random shapes that aren't neccesarily square. Although with the level of placement control, there's also a slightly higher resolution combined with a cursor that places multiple voxels.

I don't like the look of the placement controls, though... one important rule for any building engine is that it should be easy to place things in a straight line in any direction. AoS and Minecraft make this easy, by the looks of things that won't be the case in this game.

What he said.

Actually voxels are easier to work with than polygons from what I've heard. Voxels have tons of potential, and we can expect to be seeing them a lot more often in the not too distant future as hardware gets more advanced.

Oh I see, so it's just like

pixels;jpg, png, etc
as
voxels;.vox and whatever the hell that thing is.

No wonder most developers don't use that. It makes more sense to render shit with polygons. imagine having to render every single tiny little 3D voxel. Maybe that's the future, who knows.

Eh. Close enough. Kaede still got the general idea.

Voxels are a data structure, not a method of rendering. You can take the same voxel data and render it with Minecraft polys, AoS color cubes, or auto-smoothing polygon meshes as is done in this game and in a few others, for example C4 Engine.

It's like saying that

this

is not the same word as

this

because the typography is different.