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Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 8 - Final Words by (21 February 2000) |
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Special Thanks
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Tim Clark - realtime voxel landscape pionier Alex Chalfin - wrote a good gouraud voxel engine malkia / eastern.analog - coded a simple accelerated voxel landscape engine Chris Bluecheler - kindly provided some awesome seamless textures Kurt Miller - web designer and 3D coder extra-ordinaire |
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The Future of Voxel Landscape Engines
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Voxel lanscape engines with limited degree of freedom have limited potential in the future, since there are very few applications that can put up with 4 DOF. This is the case in games, where the whole concept of the game has to be designed around the limitations of the engine (e.g. Outcast). To be perfectly honest, I'm not certain of the future of generic voxel lanscapes either. The potential is there for similar quality as polygon engines, but with much simpler implementation. The problem however is hardware support, or the lack of it. Indeed, the choise between an accelerated engine running at 40 FPS in 1024x768, and a software voxel engine running at 18 FPS in 320x200 is made very quickly. |