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[Virtz]

Ever since that Lords of the Uberdark game people have been calling deformable terrain voxel-based. Even though voxel stands for volumetric pixel. And a pixel is supposed to be of exactly one colour. Perhaps a more accurate description would be grid-based? Or vertex-based? I dunno.

Anyway, I like the physics movement system in this. It seems to work a bit better in the video, but I guess that's cause it's a newer version. And their block system is probably as pretty as block-based building is gonna get. Hope they get a good development momentum going.

[lordcooper]

A voxel is the 3D equivalent of a pixel. It can't have textures on it, you can't rotate it, it can't have stuff growing out of it, you can't apply shading to it. It's a little cube that's a single color.

readme.internetz

These guys explain better than I could.

[jocan2003]

Hmmm anybody get an unresponsive progam when starting it? I start it and it eats 1g ram and 2 of my core ( stuck at 50% cpu overall ) but nothing happens. Win7 X64 Ultimate. I just want to know if im alone here.

[Sordid]

Just looking at the picture at the top of the article tells me those people don't know what voxels are either.

That's a wireframe view. What it shows is the edges of the polygons.

Hmmm anybody get an unresponsive progam when starting it? I start it and it eats 1g ram and 2 of my core ( stuck at 50% cpu overall ) but nothing happens. Win7 X64 Ultimate. I just want to know if im alone here.

I get a little settings screen and then a blank white window. If that's what you're getting, leave it there a while. It's actually loading, they just haven't added a loading screen yet, apparently.

[lordcooper]

Whereas actually reading it would show that they do.

[jocan2003]

Hmmm even after 5 minute of waiting? ill keep it longuer and see what happens

[sluissa]

Yesterday I saw this: Minecraft for XBox 360 in 5 seconds

Today I saw Starforge.

Difference... minimal. Hilarity... amazing.

[Sordid]

Hmmm even after 5 minute of waiting? ill keep it longuer and see what happens

Hm, it's usually about 30 seconds for me, but I do have a pretty powerful computer. It's still very much in pre-alpha stage, it's possible the game doesn't like something about your system and the proper error message simply isn't coded in yet.

Whereas actually reading it would show that they do.

Okay, I have read it. No they don't.

Before you can do anything else, you need to be familiar with the general structure of 3d objects (vertices, triangles, normals, etc)

Again, that's talking about polygons.

Voxel is a contraction for  volumetric pixel . It means that your world is made of points in a 3d environment. Each point is either filled of empty. In most cases filled points in the 3d universe are represented as cubes and the organization of these cubes makes the shape of every objects. What you need to understand is that  filling an entire world with cube (depending on the size of your world) can easily represents dozens of millions of cubes (no kidding). For example, the main island in the first part of our presentation video weights about one million cubes. No modern computer can handle that many different objects or that much geometry. 12 millions cubes, with six faces per cubes and two triangles per face makes 144 million triangles.

Yeah, he's talking about precisely the thing that I already told you voxels are not, i.e. cubes made of polygons. There are no polygons in a voxel.

Let me try to explain in a more simple way. Let's start from pixels, those little squares that the picture on your monitor is composed of. Let's say you have a piece of graph paper with numbered rows and columns. That's your screen, and you want to draw a circle on it. Now there are two ways you can do that. The first way is to know the position of the center of the circle and its diameter. Using that information you can draw a circle and then fill in every square that it intersects, rendering a circle on your paper 'screen'. That's how vector (i.e. polygon) graphics work. The second approach is to know the coordinates of every pixel that needs to be filled in order to form the image of a circle. That's how raster (or bitmap) graphics work, and a voxel object is nothing more than a three dimensional bitmap. Obviously the vector approach is a lot more efficient, since you only need to store two pieces of information in order to be able to create the image of a circle (its position and diameter), whereas with the bitmap approach you have to store the image itself in its entirety. That's why the vast majority of 3D games are vector-based.

Further info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4 (note: The claims he makes about his technology are almost certainly bullshit in some way and there is a thread about it already on this forum IIRC, but he does a very good job of showing you the difference between polygon and voxel graphics.)

[Catastrophic lolcats]

The voxel revoultion is much better than the 3D revoultion.

Funny you should say that, given that there's not a single voxel in that game as far as I can tell.

That may be so, I'm fairly ignorant of the exact mechanics and technics that cover the term "voxel". You'll noticed the key word in my statement though is "revolution".
Ever since Infiniminer, Minecraft and the other games that popularised voxels and the effect they can have on world (de)formation and then adding a focus on resource gathering and survival, it has more or less spawn it's own genre that's usually gets labled "those voxel games".

Incorrect to call them so? Yes, but it looks like it's here to stay at this point and it's never that fun to argue about semantics anyway. I suppose this has happened since the genre can be rather hard to define, so anything thing "voxel-like" gets lumped together.


As for the game itself which I only just played I have some comments. It's very alpha at this point but I'm still having fun. While the movements seem rather odd and clunky at times, the physics that allow you to bounch off terriain and objects like a ragdoll is awesome. It can be a blast to hit a spinner and fly into a wall with neck-breaking speed. 

The gameplay doesn't have much going for it right now apart from dicking around with the physics. The UI like health and ammo is a place-holder and don't function currently. The gunplay is also very bland currently and can also be rather clunky. The enemies are also pretty dim, bullet sinks, that seem to tank the FPS.
The game is also very demanding and I can only get 20 FPS on highest on my gaming rig, 15 in a decent firefight. Lesser-than 3 FPS in a really big one.

Graphics are pretty although there's something a little off about the grass terrain. There is way too much motion blur (imo) and it makes getting hit by enemy or spinner extremely confusing in first person since you can't see anything. Bloom is nice and doesn't seem to be over done. Skybox and clouds are again pretty.

There doesn't seem to be a cavern system that I cound find in the game currently. So I'm not sure what the part of the video where they were mining comes into it. Digging can also be rather confusing in a navigation sense. A compass or mini-map would easily fix this.
The "cubic building system" is a little hard to use. It doesn't seem to respond directly to your crosshair and would be better to implement the "drag and draw" method that Ace of Spades uses. The different tile sets are very nice though and look very good as well.

Devs shows a brief section of vehicle play in the trailer but I couldn't find a way to spawn one. Instead there was turrets and spinners to play with. The turrets seem to act rather strange when placed on normal terrain rather than the buildable bricks.

Apart from all these small problems it's still decent and with a few updates it looks like it could easily hit "shippable". Going to be keeping a very close eye on this one, methinks.

[alway]

Nope, you are wrong, it is voxel based.
From wikipedia:

A voxel (volumetric pixel or Volumetric Picture Element) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space.

Voxels aren't how things are rendered. Voxels are a data structure which are meant for storing information about some 3 dimensional thing. Again, how that data structure is then visualized is irrelevant to the data structure itself. Hell, it could even be playing musical notes in a 3 dimensional space with no graphical elements at all and it would still be considered voxel based.

A volume containing voxels can be visualized either by direct volume rendering or by the extraction of polygon iso-surfaces which follow the contours of given threshold values. The marching cubes algorithm is often used for iso-surface extraction, however other methods exist as well.

The voxels are accessed in the data structure as needed, their data is used to construct a faster rendering polygonal mesh (fast rendering because the hardware of a GPU is optimized for triangles), and then that mesh is rendered to the screen.

[PTTG??]

Now that is how you make a minecraft clone. Insomuch as as Half-life was a Doom clone. I hope that the people behind this move to the minecraft distribution method; if they wait a week or two, get a really polished version ready, and start selling preorders, then they will be millionaires in half an hour.

[Sordid]

The only problem I've hit is that the screen randomly goes completely black, with just the HUD visible. Not sure what's up with that.

Incorrect to call them so? Yes, but it looks like it's here to stay at this point and it's never that fun to argue about semantics anyway. I suppose this has happened since the genre can be rather hard to define, so anything thing "voxel-like" gets lumped together.

Or you could, y'know, help stop it by not referring to them as such anymore. "Oh everyone else is doing it, I might as well" is the most pathetic excuse for anything ever. I can't stand it when people do that. Please don't do that.

As for the game itself which I only just played I have some comments. It's very alpha at this point but I'm still having fun. While the movements seem rather odd and clunky at times, the physics that allow you to bounch off terriain and objects like a ragdoll is awesome.

That's because the movement is physics-based as well. In most games pressing the movement buttons just moves you at a constant pace with a modifier depending on whether you're going uphill or downhill. That's not the case here. I have no idea what exact method this game uses, but there was one other game that had physics-based movement and that was Trespasser. There your character sat on an invisible cube that would spin if you pressed the movement buttons, and the friction between the cube and the environment would propel you forward. It felt very similar to how this game feels.

Nope, you are wrong, it is voxel based.
From wikipedia:

A voxel (volumetric pixel or Volumetric Picture Element) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space.

Voxels aren't how things are rendered. Voxels are a data structure which are meant for storing information about some 3 dimensional thing. Again, how that data structure is then visualized is irrelevant to the data structure itself.

That quote says that a voxel is a volume element (i.e. the 3D equivalent of a picture element, or pixel) that represents a value in a data structure. It doesn't say that it is that value, merely its representation. You say that voxels aren't how things are rendered and you use a quote that say the exact opposite to support your point? Learn elementary English grammar.

A volume containing voxels can be visualized either by direct volume rendering or by the extraction of polygon iso-surfaces which follow the contours of given threshold values. The marching cubes algorithm is often used for iso-surface extraction, however other methods exist as well.

The voxels are accessed in the data structure as needed, their data is used to construct a faster rendering polygonal mesh (fast rendering because the hardware of a GPU is optimized for triangles), and then that mesh is rendered to the screen.

Yes, the data that's used to render voxel graphics can also be converted into polygons. I fail to see how this supports your point.

Here's an example of a game that actually does use voxels for its graphics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw I believe the difference between that and StarForge should be pretty clear. If not, google it and play it. It's free.

[alway]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
I'm a 5th year game dev student; I know what I'm talking about.

[Sordid]

Yes, that article supports every single thing I said and nothing that you said (though the list of voxel games is hilariously wrong). Perhaps you should read it instead of just quoting the first sentence? Although on second thought, nevermind. Given that you misunderstood that sentence to mean the exact opposite of what it actually says, I doubt reading the whole thing would do you any good.

I'm a 5th year game dev student; I know what I'm talking about.

I'm sure you'll understand if I don't take your word for that.

[Drakale]

Whoa no need to be so aggressive over a semantic argument.

As far as I know, the term can be used to refer to the underlying world building logic, even if the actual rendering is regular polygons.