Nice graphics would be enough for me to "watch and be amazed."

Lots of updates recently!!!

Yes! A new news article! Now, I'm sorry, but I still don't understand the "voxel" thing...

Well, the title screens are cool- I like that effect, and the picture is nice, but I still don't really get it.

[The text of this article has been removed by a news editor due to violation of the acceptable use policy.]

This voxel demo looks amazing! Now all we need is for it to be polished up and released as an SDK like the FAT engine. Flight-sims will come to the 89 in style!

From what I know about voxels, each pixel on the screen has a volume in the game world. This is different than making a 3D skeleton and then layering textures over it. PC games abandoned them years ago because they were much less efficient and detailed than making 3D models.

I'm afraid not... While voxels have been largely surpassed by polygonal graphics, they are still in limited use. (For example, NovaLogic used voxels for Delta Force 2) Also, with proper implementation, they can be even more efficient than polygons for rendering terrain, especially on limited hardware like a calculator. Unfortunatly, they generally require more memory and the results are not as pretty (although some people argue otherwise). However, the main reason for the decrease in voxel-usage is the availability of 3D-accelerators, which allow polygon-rendering to occur very quickly, while not assisting in voxel-rendering at all.

i believe that the best way to think about voxels is in the sense of a standard coordinate system. On a 2d screen, you have an x and y axis, and you plot points in that as pixels. Voxels are points or pixels that are plotted in 3d, with an x, y, and z axis. In the sense of BASIC programming to think about it, you would write:
VoxelOn 5,74,83
or something like that. Of course i dont actually know how to use voxels and that is just an example to help with understanding of the basic idea, so that might not be the right way to think about it.

Okay, that makes sense, but that seems rather innefficient(sp) for generating pictures.

What you actually do, is have a height map (or a tile map) that indicates the height of a column of voxels. You then use a simple raycaster to render that column.

Yeah, i cant imagine actually turning on each voxel individually, that would be terrible

Wow, these graphics are amazing!!

If I knew what the crap this was about, I might be as excited as I am about the 83+ thing.

-W-

Voxels? They're pretty simple (as a concept, anyway -- not coding wise!)
In a 2D world, we have pixels, right? Now, imagine a world or object made up by sandwiching together loads of 2D bitmaps, a bit like the visible human project, but all together.
The technique was used to form objects in the game "Blood": try the "Web Link" button for a picture.

I think this Voxel Demo probably just uses a height for each "pixel" in the 2D bitmap, similar to some of Novalogic's games like Comanche.

Doing it this way takes far less memory, but it's also less flexible. For example, it doesn't let you make things like tunnels or caves (each [x,y] point has only one z value, just as each x value has only one y value in 2D functions). This isn't really much of a restriction, because terrain usually is one-to-one anyway, and caves/tunnels/other features can be produced with polygons or other tricks.

It is *really* hard to see that in 1600x1200...

a voxel based game would most likely run in 640x480 or 800x600 resoultion, definitely not 1600x1200

You can view a java generated voxel application. (See link). This is similar to the program released.

That is awesome!

I really liked flying through the mountain.

-W-

LOL! Me too... that seems complex and confusing to program with. Generating and using a 3D map, I think, would be hard.