What happened to them?

>>106113325 (OP)
Voxel-based graphics look bad. The only game that pulled them off well was Minecraft, and Minecraft is more of a blocky game then voxel game.
Voxels in terms of performance are also inferior to basic vertices.
And voxel terrain like in your pic looks unrealistic and bad, so unless it’s a building game where voxels are needed for gameplay reasons it’s not worth it.

>>106113325 (OP)
obsoleted by nanite

>>106113362
It's an alien planet in another dimension why would it look "normal"

>>106113368
Suspense of disbelief. Mountains that have perfect pyramid shaped are less believable on another planet then three-eyed frog that shits from its forehead

>>106113362
>*roblox your path*

>>106113362
Minecraft does not use voxels, even if they look like it.

>>106113325 (OP)
graphics cards were optimized for drawing polygons. Voxels couldn't compete with that

>>106113325 (OP)
Require high IQ to implement well and people need to be accepting of the art style which they aren't as the "pixel" look of it is associated with indie games (fake games as far as the norman is concerned). Also if you go voxel you go physics and a certain console generation neutered physics in mainstream games

Best practical voxel engine I've seen is the one in Teardown which has a V2 in progress with a lot of interesting improvements

>>106113500
What's the difference?

>>106113525
Voxels represent a 3D object by filling it with little cubes, kinda like pixel art but in 3D. Regular ass polygons are hollow, generally speaking.

>you now remember Everquest Next
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8-7PbaGIpM

>>106113325 (OP)
More like voxcels

>>106113565
minecraft is literally a voxel engine with a renderer that represents the voxels as cubes, you're fucking retarded

>>106114057
There's nothing voxel about Minecraft, all cubes are made of triangles.

>>106114237
They're stored as voxels in the game logic.
The fact that they're rendered as triangles is just an implementation detail of the renderer.

Why create real pixels when you can generate fake frames?

>>106113473
Roblox looks like shit. The art style is disgusting.

>>106113565
Generally speaking you're a retard and shouldn't be speaking.

>>106114274
>voxels
>game logic
Voxels aren't game logic, they're rendering primitives. If you turn them into triangles and slap textures to them they're no longer voxels, you're simply storing regular mesh objects in a multidimensional array.

>>106113325 (OP)
In our memories

>>106113362
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand voxel-based graphics. The rendering pipeline is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of computational geometry and data structures, most of the techniques will go over a typical developer's head.
There's also the technology's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into its very structure—its philosophy draws heavily from atomic theory, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depth of this volumetric data, to realize that it's not just "blocky"—it's a profound statement about the discrete nature of space itself.
As a consequence, people who dislike voxels truly ARE idiots. Of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the beauty in a perfectly optimized Sparse Voxel Octree, which itself is a cryptic reference to the memory-intensive nature of true 3D representation. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated polygon-pushers scratching their heads in confusion as John Carmack's genius unfolds itself on their monitors. What fools... how I pity them.
And yes, by the way, I DO have a voxel engine tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only—and even then, they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

>>106113473
>Random roblox screenshot
>Pictures of little girls in the background

>>106113325 (OP)
I mainly see voxels used for 'destructible' 3D games. Teardown is a great example even if the new owners are trying to mismanage it.

>>106113325 (OP)
Outcast's terrain was just a ray-marched heightmap. It did give the impression of voxels with the high detail and heavy aliasing in the game's original release (the one I played) though.

Voxels can be used as either a modeling or rendering primitive. For modeling, they're still very common for parts of terrain with fully 3D structure, that can't be represented with heightmaps. E.g. CryEngine's terrain system is a heightmap-voxel hybrid. Plus most games based on construction/destruction use voxels. 3D scultping and other art workflows use voxels. Then there are entire fields where the data is intrinsically volumetric, like medical imaging.

Voxels as a rendering primitive aren't as common these days, but they have a niche. The standard algorithm for lit fog accumulates radiance into frustum-space voxels (froxels) then raycasts or ray-marches them. In offline rendering, voxels are used more broadly for participating media, clouds and such.

The reason why voxels didn't supplant other representations as a rendering primitive is basically performance, as some anons ITT point out. For any given amount of detail in a model, voxels can be made as compact in memory as (for instance) a triangle mesh, but this sparsification ultimately makes rendering slower. Voxels become just another boundary representation when made sparse, and they simply lose against other B-reps. This isn't even because triangle mesh rendering is HW-accelerated as some believe, but more fundamental.

>>106114881
>Voxels aren't game logic, they're rendering primitives.
No.... you literally just made that up.

>>106118342
no, he's right. this is the problem with nocoders trying to use jargon. you literally have no idea what you're talking about, how can you expect to use it correctly?

>>106113325 (OP)
because they're not fast enough to be sufficiently high resolution in real time to really look good.

The ultimate goal is ultra high resolution voxels plus real time PBR, then you get basically everything else for free.

>>106118421
why not use nanite-style SDF-based JIT LODs

>>106113325 (OP)
(YOU)CLYDEON UNLIMITED POINT CLOUD DATAH FOR TRULY UNLIMITED GRAPHICS

>>106118400
Voxels are just the 3D equivlanet to pixels. You can put any kind of data in a pixel and you can put any kind of data in a voxel, it's not a rendering primitive, it's data.

Its ok but only if you have a great game baking it, tech demo are just that until you figure out a way to integrate it to the game

>>106118449
Actually maybe that would be better. I'm stuck in the pixel mindset but pixels only matter for final representation on a bitmapped display they have no value extrapolated to volumetrics since things only have to be discrete in the final 2 dimensional image output.

gpus are made for polygones, not voxel.

>>106118478
Everything gets rendered to pixels you retard.

>>106118478
a pixel is just the smallest rendering unit and not necessary round or square. same for texel.

INFINITE

DETAIL

voxels changed my life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANkxRGvl1VY

<3

>>106114690
No, that anon is correct. You should find healthier ways to get attention.

>>106118478
>a GPU isn't made for voxels so it isn't a primitive

>>106118666
hardware wise, yes.

>>106113362
>Voxel-based graphics look bad.
>The only game that pulled them off well was Minecraft
Wrong.

>>106118724
And who was talking about hardware?

>>106113325 (OP)
For me, it was Voxel Quest back when it was still isometric.

1/2

>>106119809
2/2

>>106119809
>>106119821
3/3

Either that or Voxelstein 3D.

>>106113565
Voxel models can be hollow as well.

>>106118724
Nothing stops you from load voxel data on the GPU as texels and process it in the fragment shader. You just don't know graphics, anon.

>>106119875
still not a primitive. the graphic pipeline works on polygones, texels and pixels

>>106118740
Teardown is really amazing technically. It just sucks that they couldn't think of any better game idea than walking around in brownish construction sites and break stuff. They could have made any sort of generic fantasy or sci-fi world with it and it would have been the game of the decade.

>>106113325 (OP)
No mans sky is a big voxel engine game

>>106113325 (OP)
Space engineers is a modern voxel game, there also are voxel plugins for UE that add the voxel terrain.

The voxels are computationally expensive but when your game is about digging a tunnel - you need them. Anything else can be done without the voxels.

>>106119833
You should have seen the development shots that were posted on jonof. The nazi trollage was off the fucking charts kek.

>>106119875
I can't think of any reason why you'd do something like that. You'd just use compute shaders.
To the retards fighting above, a voxel is just data. You can both render it directly, basically filling screen pixels directly from the voxel data, usually with compute shaders. Or you can first generate a mesh and render it using the normal triangle pipeline. This doesn't necessarily mean Minecraft style, there's other ways to generate different meshes, like marching cubes.

>>106113500
Minecraft's rasteriser does not use voxels; the map's coordinate data however does

>>106114017
I never forgot it. I curse the jews daily for taking it away from us, even though it would have never lived up to my expectations.

>>106113473
that looks like absolute shit
>>106118215
why am i not surprised?

>>106120012
That's not what voxels are.

>>106119907
Except the parts that don't. And as previous comments, the fact that it isn't a primitive in APIs doesn't make it less of a primitive.
>>106119979
What I say is nothing stops you, not that one should do it, or should do it most of the time. Most volumetric effects these days are essentially voxels in fragment shaders. Latest Flight Simulator versions arguably abuse it for clouds, but that's what's done for many dynamic light going through dynamic smoke situations. gl using polygons or particles for that.

>>106119979
>why would you want use something that can paint pixels directly rather than something that requires transforming the output into a texture, and then require something else on top to paint
Mystery

>>106120412
>APIs
i am talking about circuitry. api is software.

>>106120625
>shaders aren't software

>>106120534
Drawing directly to the framebuffer is pretty rare in modern games that would use that effect. Usually you'd be drawing to an HDR render texture, which can be written to directly in a compute shader. Even if you're not using HDR at all it's still necessary to draw to a render texture if you have post-process passes (almost all games do) because otherwise you would need to both read and write in the frame buffer, leading to race conditions

>>106114017
This is the game that taught me to never preorder another game. I spent 100 dollars on it before any product existed, I was even quite active on the forums and shilled for it on FOH and the MMORPG site.

I did have quite a bit of fun in landmark, we had a little village going on our server with a few plots next to each other. It was pretty obvious the real game wasn't going to exist though.

The new DOnkey Kong Banaza game used voxel technology.The director seemed to really really loved it

https://www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-19-donkey-kong-bananza-part-2/

Neural rendering will probably use SVOs, so they are coming back. If you are willing to call a bunch of latent variables a voxel.

>>106113501
>graphics cards were optimized for drawing polygons. Voxels couldn't compete with that
voxel games also draw polygons you stupid dimwit

>>106119821
Damn that looks cool

>>106121352
Using the compute shader for anything graphic is retarded unless you need something really unusual. It involves data transformations, often copies, when normal.
>unusual to paint directly
The first shaders (for shading, giving the name that stuck) were literally doing that.

>>106119913
>It just sucks that they couldn't think of any better game idea than walking around in brownish construction sites and break stuff.
>he needs mores

>>106119913
I imagine the Prypiat level in Stalker SoC but the entire city is teardownable.

based NovaLogic vidya

>>106124829
https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace
https://s-macke.github.io/VoxelSpace/VoxelSpace.html
(only works in chrome?)

interesting.

>>106124879
Works on my firefox machine

>>106124295
Not with a heightmap raycasting engine. If you're using polygons to render voxels there's obviously no advantage what so ever, you might as well just use polygons, which is what people did.

>>106116269
my sides aren't being rendered rn

>>106116269
I honestly agree with this.

>>106113325 (OP)
>>106113473
>>106116269
>>106118485
>>106118635
>>106119932
>>106124829
None of these are fucking voxel renderers retards. They're meshes generated (marching cubes, usually) over some form of 3D storage structure (which are not voxels, voxels are volumetric pixels and therefore purely a rendering term).

No it being low resolution and blocky absolutely does not make it voxels either.

>>106113325 (OP)
they are literally everywhere. delete this thread, retard.

I was watching this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQBY9BM9g_Y

>>106124829
>>106126009
it looked amazing back in the day.

>>106125603
who said anything about voxel renderers you retard

first time i saw voxels was playing No Respect, at the time i couldn't understand how it was possible to have such smooth looking terrain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7heDpD5thwA

>>106116269
needs more em dash

>>106126009
>I was watching this video.
nodevs sure are getting complacent

>This is a game from 1992

>>106113365
That’s not how that works

>>106126149
>RT ON

>>106113325 (OP)
killed by GPUs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnBDmmlAfBE

remember the unlimited detail guys? kek

Voxels where a great solution to huge maps when GPUs couldn't push that much polygons.
They are simple points maps and don't require much rendering power.
Now that polygons are easy as fuck to render we don't need voxels

>>106126266
they were a solution to detailed terrain when we didn't have gpus
pic related came out the same year as >>106126009
>>106126149
your typical flight game in 1992 had flat shaded polys, with an entirely flat ground with sparse 3d objects placed on it (buildings and the like). doing /real/ 3d math on the cpus of the time was super expensive. the technique used in games like comanche on the other hand was basically a ray-casted pixel+heightmap, no actual 3D work involved so was super fast and while limited compared to real 3d (verticals would be flat-shaded, no overhangs, etc), suited realistic terrain quite well

>>106126424
>pic related

>>106126189
I don't think that's him. His voxel tech was used at Euclideon for civil engineering work and handling petabytes of laser scan data but recently he's left the company and has been doing holographic theme parks.
Here's the channel https://www.youtube.com/@AxiomHolographics/videos

>>106116269
>rick_and_morty.copypasta is turning 10 years old
wtf

>>106113325 (OP)

>>106120969
i am not talking about shaders but the graphic pipeline. gpus have specific circuitry to work on vertices and textures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_output_unit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping_unit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillrate

for example, the 5090rtx has 680 texture units and 176 render units. those are made to map a texture to a polygon, not to a voxel.

>>106118485
That is the most disgusting dirt texture I have ever seen. It literally looks like shit.

>>106113325 (OP)
what kind of retarded clickbait thread is this? the biggest game company in the world just released a blockbuster title that's entirely centered around voxels. minecraft has consistently been the 1st-3rd most popular game worldwide for 15 years straight.
you're not on xitter, you don't get paid for (You)s here.

>>106127500
Have you seen what the game looks like? All of it looks like absolute ass.

>>106127487
And you can use voxels as texel data and render it in the shader natively. Not sure what your point is.

>>106119913
are you a woman?

>>106125603
you're subhuman

>>106127736
no not natively. you are wrong. you may implement voxels on top of vertices but at the cost of performances.

>>106118562
why can't video games make us of the R G B substructure of pixels like cleartype does?

>>106127852
>at the cost of performances
Prove it

they get used all the time in vfx.

>>106127852
>no you can't process textures as textures
retard

Any of you remember John Lin's engine? if only he had released the code man

>>106127868
if you take a look at a gpu instruction set like AMD rdna3, you will see that nothing is fit for voxels. All the interpolating instructions are barycentric, for example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnj-q3ux-Us

I will now play your videogame.

Voxels?
Voice celibate?
Angry virgins with effeminate voices?

>>106128012
>a stack of textures doesn't match texturing units

>>106119913
>if I ignore the main gameplay mechanics if this game then this game has no gameplay

>>106127858
because some games need the color

>Not a single mention of John Lin's Sandbox
pretty fucking grim
https://youtu.be/1R5WFZk86kE

>>106128592
Anon I was expecting a serious answer, my thinking is that they don't do it because it increases the raw computing requirements to the equivalents of very high resolutions.

Carmack apparently experimented with voxel-engines for Quake 3 but ended up abandoning it for polygons.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041031155026/https://firingsquad.com/features/carmack/page13.asp

>>106128726
Ken Silverman (Duke nukem 3d) also toyed with voxels
https://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm
https://www.voxon.co/

Threads like these remind me how this board should never be taken seriously for anything tech related.

>>106128822
Same holy fuck what a mess

>>106113325 (OP)
most games using it looked like shit, it wasn't suitable for offline rendering (because it looked like shit), and it had bad support on "modern" (mid 2000s onwards) gpus. also it's wonky for physics on concave objects in the most typical implementations that just use 2d heightmaps

>>106128822
>>106128835
this is why i have zero respect for code monkeys. they're invariably completely clueless except on leetcode trivia/puzzles

>>106128707
no, it's because a pixel is just data to apply to a texture

and said pixels already have more data than just RGBA (e.g. on a texture it might include a vector for the normal of the surface at that point for use with bump mapping)

>>106129198
yea but why don't they leverage anti aliasing using that?

>>106129062
if someone can do leetcodes and curve ball leetcodes at random then he's not a codemonkey

>>106130103
they do though. i get the feeling you're out of real questions because you're an "ai-assisted" leetcoder who doesnt know anything about graphics

>>106130265
Anon you're quite unhinged, are you an angry neet? Stop being mad about your shitty life, it leaks out and you make a mess around here.

>>106130278
i am employed but very unhinged. i implore you to experience the world before asking about it so that your questions have some merit

>>106130103
some games do and allow you to render at 200% of the resolution. i think the nvidia driver also has that feature.

>>106125603
Comanche is voxels, you fucking imbecile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space

Voxels are difficult, man. The sheer amount of volumetric data it takes to feed a fairly competent voxel renderer is utterly ridiculous. No amount of compression is going to save you either; now you're just making it exponentially more expensive to do anything with your fucking voxels.
"Real" voxels still utterly humble modern machines. That's the real issue.

>>106131912
to be fair they havent had 30 years of hardware optimization specifically for it. if you try to play a game from 2002 on a modern i7 it bursts into flame too

>>106124787
>Using the compute shader for anything graphic is retarded unless you need something really unusual.
No, it really isn't. It's totally normal to implement your postprocessing stack as compute shaders. It's even normal to render geometry such as raycasting voxels or SDFs. Believe it or not even triangle rasterization is done in compute shaders with Nanite
>The first shaders (for shading, giving the name that stuck) were literally doing that.
Yes, I'm aware, but froxel fog is a modern technique

>>106125603
i'm with you on this

>>106132899
...except that you included OP, that one is actually a voxel game

are there any games that actually render voxels by ray casting, and not just converting voxel data to polygon meshes?

>>106133471
a bunch of 90s games did it, idk about any modern ones

>>106133471
There are plenty on youtube or shadertoy, most don't end up getting shipped though

>>106126149
I used to play the shit out of that game. Calling in an MLRS strike was great.

Voxels looked great at the time too.

>>106127858
that's an interesting question, i would imagine the cost wouldn't be worth the visual difference. it'd be a complete waste (no visual difference) outside of edges, but i'm not sure what it'd look like on the edges, it likely makes more sense for most purposes to do any other form of AA (as edges are typically much sharper than adjacent textures, having a soft edge not only doesn't stand out, it can help blend things together). subpixel rendering for fonts is because sharpness is important for small fonts (despite what ebussy says)

>>106127858
>>106135121
-- that said i'd still be curious to see if someone can come up with a shader to demonstrate it. it could be like the most minimal "no AA" looking AA which reduces jaggies but otherwise leaves a super sharp edge

>>106113362
spoken with such confidence, too
anyway, this is a thread full of zoomers and boomers speaking past eachother
I'll come back later to see how it settles

>>106113362
Minecraft voxels are huge even when close. Voxels are supposed to get smaller and smaller as the camera get close to the point you can't see them apart anymore.

>>106136378
That's point cloud, not voxels.

Minecraft is voxels, just big.

>>106127247
god damn it

>>106132282
There's just not that much to optimize, voxels are data centered not computation centered, at best you can use sparse octrees and maybe run length encoding or something like jpeg encoding but you'll still end up with a power of 3 data structure thats the main problem
Signed distance fields on the other hand can be learned by neural nets so there might be something to gain at least for complex functions and they have the same advantages as voxels with arguably better resolution since its just math functions producing geometry

>>106135121
Cleartype on ~94 ppi 1080p is day and night vs grayscale anti aliasing.

>>106127967
that looks pretty neat

>>106113325 (OP)
They're difficult to work with and can't be easily animated. If you make models with them it's easy to end up with blobs that don't represent much of anything, like the the case of Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2.

>>106137328
SDF is just a format to store voxel data. Just like alembic cache is for topology...

>>106138384
SDF is more like an acceleration structure. The format for storing voxels is usually a sparse octree.

>>106138242
>blobs that don't represent much of anything, like the the case of Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2
never thought units in those games didn't look like anything

>>106138242
Those were nice! They were the pixel art equivalent for voxels (with individual hand made frames), instead of the horrible rixel equivalent we got everywhere like minecraft.

>>106140518
That's kinda the point of voxels though. A 3D bitmap the same way a picture is a 2D bitmap.

>>106135121
>Pawel
you don't get to bring friends

>>106138384
>>106139517
>SDF is just a format to store voxel data
Holy dunning-kruger. SDFs are just mathematical functions that map a point in space to a distance to an isosurface. They can have infinite detail and can describe smooth continuous geometry. Voxels are rough, discretized approximations of a volume.

>>106128592
>>106135121
>>106135139
I've done this in old OpenGL with blending, I'd assume a shader isn't hard to achieve this either.
You get weird rainbow artifacts sometimes but no worse than you'd get on old TVs e.g. like CoD 4 fences on a CRT.
It definitely improves the horizontal fidelity.
I'm assuming nobody's done this in a game because handling the edge case monitors with weird subpixel layouts and all orientations of monitors is difficult and there's no standard API for doing this portably, and it's a detail you don't want to confuse most players with.

>>106113325 (OP)
Enshrouded is voxel based and is quite successful for a new IP from a literalwho studio, sold like 2m copies in 10 days, even under the shadows of Palworld during its craze.

>>106142017
Oh it hits 4m now
https://opencritic.com/news/15275/enshrouded-sales-hit-4m-as-sixth-major-update-revealed-techraptor

>>106141866
You can create another grid that stores the distance to the nearest voxel for faster marching. It's essentially an sdf

>>106142017
>Enshrouded is voxel based
"no"

terrain deformation is not voxels

>>106138384
No I mean actual SDFs, the kind where you get a function and evaluate it and then or it with some other function to get addition subtraction etc
The problem with SDFs is that you have to evaluate the entire scene per pixel or at least a subset of it, so if you could do it in a fixed amount of steps it would be a huge improvement IE you use a NN to learn it and then evaluate that instead

>>106116097
where is that from?

yeah this game uses voxels just look at it

>>106142568
as long as you stay in linear space and do not excessively complicate the scene you can do SDF in log(n) computations (literally just don't run the SDF function on your oct tree if there's no fucking chance of a surface being in that octent). it'll massively speed things up, but you run into problems if you're using non linear space (e.g. any noise gradient) it also does not fix the problem of non accurate fields (e.g. the surface may be further than the field indicates, this won't solve it, but you may cull stages still depending on distances).

>>106143556
>his games are only 1d

>>106143601
linear, as in a smooth gradient over the space you're working with. noise maps are non linear, expontential would also run into issues... You can only predict where the surface of an SDF is if the field is normalized.

>>106143761
thats not what linear means

>>106143761
>bro hasn't heard of asymptotes

>>106141891
yea, that's true. you'd have to add an option in-game for subpixel layout
>>106141861
i don't know what that means