Why did Voxels die?

[Captain n00by]

I demand an explanation. It was the tech that made the original so cool - actual volumetric and bumpy surfaces in a time when almost everything polygon looked flat and boring.

Atleast NMS still sort of uses them, converted to polygons.

[nuffe]

Lighting voxels in any way is really processor intensive. It usually involves raymarching, raytracing, or any of the tracing of ray algorithms.

Polygons are easy to render and manipulate, and there's so much you can do with a flat surface compared to a set of static data. That flat surface can have ligthing and shading applied to it, transform, textures, advanced shader programming (fake depth), and much MUCH more.

This is the reason why polygons still are the goto method of geometry rendering, its easier, cheaper, and more versitile.

[Captain n00by]

Originally posted by nuFF3 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°):

Lighting voxels in any way is really processor intensive. It usually involves raymarching, raytracing, or any of the tracing of ray algorithms.

Polygons are easy to render and manipulate, and there's so much you can do with a flat surface compared to a set of static data. That flat surface can have ligthing and shading applied to it, transform, textures, advanced shader programming (fake depth), and much MUCH more.

This is the reason why polygons still are the goto method of geometry rendering, its easier, cheaper, and more versitile.

Thanks for reply, but I still feel we lost a certain charm by abandoning the tech.

Still, the new Outcast looks tasty.

[tomimt]

Voxels aren't completely dead. There's couple of voxel based engines out there which can do pretty impressive looking stuff, so there's improvement happening on the tech. But even when they do very high resolution stuff, you still can see that the models are a bit blocky in comparison to polygon equilevents.

But the voxels do allow pretty sweet looking dynamic destruction.

[nuffe]

Originally posted by tomimt:

Voxels aren't completely dead. There's couple of voxel based engines out there which can do pretty impressive looking stuff, so there's improvement happening on the tech. But even when they do very high resolution stuff, you still can see that the models are a bit blocky in comparison to polygon equilevents.

But the voxels do allow pretty sweet looking dynamic destruction.

Had hardware been designed around crunching voxels rather than vertices we might have seen more advanced stuff done by now. Right now its limited to CPU or GPGPU rendering, rather than hardware accelerated.
On the subject of "unblocking" blocky voxel meshes, Nvidia had a nice tech demo floating around the web showing off GPGPU voxels with smoothing. It looked neat, ran fast, but ultimately forgotten as people would rather use tris than voxels.
The smoothing ultimately made it look like bilinear filtering, but for voxels.

But where voxels stopped being used as potential polygon killers for mesh rendering, they thrive as global illumination methods. Plenty of high budget, high profile game feature voxel GI.
MGS5 and Forza Horizon 3 just to name a few.

[argoon]

Yes voxels were cool back then but now they are just to low rez, but voxels are not dead, they are pretty much alive, many modern engines still use voxel based tech, for example Cryengine 5 and UE4, etc, the diference is that even tho they use voxels, they don't display them, they are only used to calculate in the background certain effects, like SVOGI and then, they use good old polygons to display the final result. About terrain there's a indie engine called Tombstone engine where the terrain uses voxels for the calculation but the final mesh is still represented has polygons.

[Plex]

PS4 would struggle with Voxels since the CPU has a very weak single thread performance.
But then again, it counters it with an amount of cores.

[Samogon]

There was never a voxel engine in Outcast. It's just a terrain that was made of "voxels" (actually heightmaps, to be correct), but most of the geometry was made of polygons. So the "voxel" engine in Outcast is really just a myth. Unity uses heightmaps for terrain, too. Any major engine uses heightmaps for terrains, but it can't be called voxels, since voxels are 3-dimensional structures, while heightmaps are 2-dimensional maps and it's not possible to make for example a cave using heightmaps.

[Captain n00by]

Originally posted by Alex626:

So the "voxel" engine is really just a myth.

Voxelstein 3D uses a proper Voxel engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCtgtF52nAQ

True enough for Outcast and the old Novalogic games though, they used ray-casted voxel height maps, so they weren't "true" volumetric voxel games. But it still was interesting tech in it's time.

[Samogon]

Yeah, of course I meant "So the "voxel" engine in Outcast is really just a myth. "