Voxel 3d

[Reaperman93010]

so 2x can't out-polygon a system designed to do it for a living. But it's probably as good at voxels as everybody else though, which a accelerated 3d provides little to no help on. The low res screen might not hurt matters either. Voxels might do very well on portables.

http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap05.htm

just tossing another idea out there.

 

[ravuya]

Voxel engines are hard to write, and can't represent some geometric shapes that polygon engines can.

But, yeah, it's fun to write voxel engines, although Silverman's engine there uses a lot of SSE and 3DNow x86 ASM instructions for particular processor families.

 

[Reaperman93010]

that one would be a poor choice then,
voxels have a few advantages--but they're not especially big advantages anymore.
all except the ease of random generation, which is still very nice.

some kind of tutorial

I suppose the biggest advantage of it is that it doesn't use the standard 3d methods...which, while much easier, their tools are out of our system's reach at the moment.

 

[Silberstein]

Good that you mention it, I've been thinking about asking the same question myself.. Voxels are quite nice really..

 

[Anhaedra]

Hmm... Could this engine be ported to the GP2X and then built upon to make games? That would be quite nice, since it seems Voxel engines do not make use of an FPU...

 

[Paradox]

i used to make voxels for C&C tiberian sun

 

[nickspoon]

If I'm not mistaken, voxels are being used by some to render shapes that simply can't be rendered by polygons. You know, natural things. Most new voxel engines make use of 3D cards and take of lots of power in order to generate accurate renderings. There may be exceptions, but it's quite safe to say polygons will probably be first. And easier.

 

[TKF15H]

Voxel terrains are more likely to happen, rather than normal polygon-based terrains.
Commanche (helicopter sim, used voxel terrains) ran on old computers without a 3D card, so the technique should also work nicely on the gp2x.

 

[nickspoon]

In which case, we'll have to find a reasonably basic voxel library and give it a go.

 

[ravuya]

In which case, we'll have to find a reasonably basic voxel library and give it a go.

​

I'd say it's best to build from the ground up here, we have some excellent hardware support on the 2x that old DOS machines never provided.

 

[Anhaedra]

I'm not a programmer, but wouldn't it be easier to find a somewhat basic voxel engine and modify it to suit our needs instead of building one from scratch?

 

[Reaperman93010]

the tutorial seems to suggest that it isn't too terribly difficult to build from scratch.

 

[ingrin]

Not much to add, other than this seems like a good idea.
Here is a page where someone describes making a Voxel Engine for 100mhz ARM processor mobile phones, might be able to cull some useful ideas from it...
http://www.flipcode.com/articles/article_mobilegfx01.shtml

 

[Muncher666]

Wow, that really is freaking awesome, and it doesn't even use floating point math. The screen shots look damned nice.

Allan.