Voxels - I thought this was old news/dead news

I thought our cute friend the voxel was unloved - I've even heard people talk about how it is dated and never to return, blah, blah.

Well, my little chimp-pups, it just so happens that the all new DX10 Larging affair - ie Crysis, is using voxel landscapes.

Voxel Object: Allows creating geometry that a heightmap system wouldn’t support to create cliffs, caves, canyons and alien shapes. Voxel editing is as easy as heightmap editing and fast in rendering.

What have you got to say about that?

There are little disputes popping up all over the internet about the pros and cons of such a system.

As, for me - I'm terribly excited about the whole thing.

Took 13+ minutes for that post to appear. Some kind of problem with the site.

I remember Outcast. that pushed my PC but it was cool.

I've not seen a modern real-time voxel-generated landscape, but I clearly remember stuff like Outcast - and it looked awful. Let's hope that hardware has now advanced to the point at which voxel landscapes can achieve their potential.

outcast looked cool.

The only annoting thing was max screen was something like 530.413 or so

Judging from that tech vid that was around a while back the voxel system in Crysis looks more like a sort of polygon-hybrid thing than the true voxels used in Outcast - they seem to be a clever way to dynamically add extra detail to bits of the landscape and locally add more polygons into the landscape mesh, so the entire landscape is still built from polys and not what I remember as voxels from Comanche and Outcast, which were just flat rectangles overlaid on the screen.

I just finished playing outcast a few weeks ago =)
Great game, and good looking too!

It would be realy cool if 3D hardware would implement stuff to handle voxels, as polygons have a limit.

If you want to play around with "new" voxels, check out Voxlap feks.

Played Outcast a year ago and thought it looked great. Especially impressive as it didn't use any 3D acceleration.

Didn't that Trespasser dinosaur game with the horrid physics use voxel graphics?

Remember how Half-Life 2 was going to be a complete explorable city? Remember how Unreal 2 was going to feature an interactive speech system?

It would be too generous to call some of the claims I have heard "marketing hype". This is probably a complete fabrication.

That was all polygons im afraid.

comanche 3 and Deltaforce 2 were pretty cool and had voxel terrain. Comanche looked way ahead of its time, and Delta force had voxel grass you could hide in with your Ghili suit and was a fantastic game for people that like sniping.

SHame the 3D engine for polys sucked so interriors bogged down to a slideshow. But I loved both of those games.

Tried to get them to work in XP, Comanche 3 is an old DOS game though from 1997.

Mmm, Crytek are not using voxels for landscapes - they state:

Pretty much clarifies it.

I've played quite a few voxel games at my time... Z.A.R shooter + I still have it's mission pack... Here's some shots: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/zar/screenshots

Some motorbike action game...
Novalogic's simulators...
Outcast...
Good times... Mostly sh1t games...

I finished outcast about 10 years ago and they all do a funny dance at the end. The visuals were low res and a bit slow but they were pretty interesting.

"Integrated Voxel Objects Technology" probably means a staticmesh of a cliff or a large rock placed on the landscape, maybe with some additional terrain-specific features. I think they're calling any terrain feature that isn't a heightmap a "voxel object".

@Anatoly... that 'ZAR' looks half decent. Will it play on a modern XP install?

DX9 for Blitz3D is now officially more exciting than voxels.

@Nomen luni
I wouldn't see the reason why not... You can probably find the old demo lying around the great www somewhere... The screens look like they've been taken from gl version though...
The game had some potential. but was hard and it got boring at times... But had a very decent multiplayer mode...

What was that top down "Car" game, where you had been thrown out of the hive? Vangers? or somthing, that was voxels, (And weird). It wasnt bad, though I never got into it in a big way.

Oh yeah that's right! Vangers was pretty cool, but was too tough in the beginning, although a lot of missions and worlds gave it a flavor... I'm sure a demo can still be found... I actually think I have it on one of my older cds...

I'm not sure why some people here think CryEngine 2's "voxel" technology is just hype - it's not. In fact, it appears to be already up and running in the engine and editor right now. Take a look at this video at 6:45 (near the end) if you don't believe me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vblfxeh_OQQ

It's obvious that they're using some sort of voxel technology there (especially since they say so ;) ), but of course it all gets translated to polygons in the end. Voxels is no longer simply a rendering technique, but now more of a modeling tool. Their Voxel technology makes it easy for the level designers to carve caves/cliffs/ledges/etc. into the terrain seamlessly, which was previously very difficult (if not impossible).

That's cool, but like I said, they are just calling it a "voxel" because it deviates from a 2D heightmap.

There are many ways you can deviate from a 2D hightmap. You can use CSG to carve into the terrain, you can use voxels, etc., etc. When they say they use the voxel approach, I would tend to believe them. Of course, they are being converted to polygons, and you might not want to call them "voxels" because of that, but I think the name applies well enough.

Voxel Viva!

I just wanted to say that. Carry on...