Will you start a class action lawsuit against SOE once the game gets boring because they misrepresented the game to you?*
*Having them misuse the term may give you a back door to a refund.
I say, oversell it, flat out lie, et al... the game will still be so been there done that no matter if they give us the truth or not. Let the fabrications begin!
By the way, just to clear things up. Voxels can be rendered in a variety of ways, including polygons. Cubic environents are often a polygonal representation of a voxel dataset. I never looked into minecraft but it looks like a perfect example of voxels rendered with polygons as cubes. You can also render voxels by transforming them to smoother polygon meshes with algorithms such as marching cubes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
Volume datasets from CTs or MRIs are also stored as voxels and often rendered with raycasting:
Unlike stated before, this can and is often done on the GPU. The voxels are send to the GPU as 3D texture.
Voxel quest (http://www.voxelquest.com/) is a pretty cool voxel project where, as of now, the voxels are rendered as screen aligned squares or circles. Or in the case of water, raycasting as far as I know.
Also, there is no unlimited detail (except, maybe, with proceduraly generated datasets, like. fractals). Coarse voxel worlds can be rendered in a smooth way but that's not an unlimited amount of detail, it's a nice way to render a very low amount of detail. More detailed voxel datasets tend to need enormous amounts of space and rendering performance and as such they are also limited by hardware and algorithms.
(in computer-based modeling or graphic simulation) each of an array of elements of volume that constitute a notional three-dimensional space, especially each of an array of discrete elements into which a representation of a three-dimensional object is divided.
So if the terrain of a game like EQNext is held in a data array and that is being fed into the mesh builder and the engine can rebuild the mesh at will, then EQNext uses a voxel engine. You can argue all you want, doesn't mean you're right.
I still have some university books that explain voxels, but they all deal with rendering. There's only one text that seems to match what that EQNext developer refers to as voxel, a simple octree or quadtree type system that subdivides your assets, a sort of storage management system.
But it's a real stretch to argue that constitutes as a voxel engine.
Can you cite discussions by others with advanced understanding of this technical issue who share your understanding that "voxel farm" is not "voxels"? Not being a smart ass. I want to read an opinion from someone with verifiable credentials, not a pseudo-anonymous person from the internet.
I don't know what a voxel farm is to be honest.
It's a engine designed to smooth out Voxels and add texture to them.. or something like that, the guy who created it has plenty of vids to watch that explain the tech. I believe EQN is using it. Search Voxel Farm Engine on youtube.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by Xiaoki I think the problem with this thread are a couple posters needlessly arguing semantics.
No, EQ Next does not use a Voxel graphics engine. No major video game since Outcast does.
"Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to computer games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the VoxelSpace engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine".The engine is purely software-based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card."
Originally posted by Xiaoki I think the problem with this thread are a couple posters needlessly arguing semantics.
No, EQ Next does not use a Voxel graphics engine. No major video game since Outcast does.
But nearly every video game graphics engine does use voxels in some way.
Games like Call of Duty will use voxels to render bullet holes in walls.
So, in EQ Next if you build a wall it will be made of polygons but if you destroy or deform that wall that is when it will use voxels.
The OP and you are almost right there, EQN uses a voxel grid to render terrain polygons because GPU's are optimized to render polygons. These voxels are invisible and only serve as anchor points to create the polygons. I have worked with similar engines and EQ is not a pure Voxel engine like Outcast but it does use what is called sparse voxel rendering to create similar results with a marching cubes algorithm.
Here is an example for a marching cubes algorithm and how these Voxel anchor points are used to deform the terrain. Every Voxel that does not have it's default grid value creates additional polygons via a generic algorithm that can be implemented in GPU shaders. This is a relatively effective way to produce a decent looking terrain but has severe limitations due to the amount of memory used to store all the voxels. This is one reason you see chunks of terrain pop in with most voxel based games:
EQN uses a standard marching cubes engine but unfortunately they have not solved the performance or memory issues that come with it and instead opted to reduce the grid on distant objects which creates very unattractive looking massive blocks all over the terrain.
I have uninsstalled EQ Landmark but if anyone want's to see what i mean i can install it and make some secreenshots to show you the horrible looking effect on distant objects. Something they hide in their marketing shots by either not having distant objects or cranking up the engine detail for the one screenshot which is however not a setting you can get more than 10 FPS even with a 980 GPU.
Originally posted by Xiaoki I think the problem with this thread are a couple posters needlessly arguing semantics.
No, EQ Next does not use a Voxel graphics engine. No major video game since Outcast does.
But nearly every video game graphics engine does use voxels in some way.
Games like Call of Duty will use voxels to render bullet holes in walls.
So, in EQ Next if you build a wall it will be made of polygons but if you destroy or deform that wall that is when it will use voxels.
Please exoplain how exactly do they use voxels there?
A voxel is just a point in 3d space. A single coordinate that can be used as an anchor for the decal of a bullet hole. Using voxels gives you very accurate bullet holes.
Voxels are used as approximations for many things. For example, you can create very realistic looking clouds even with a very coarse grid and a special render algorithm.
Left: sparse voxel grid. Right: with cloud shader applied.
It's like people saying Minecraft is a Voxel engine. It's not.
Just because something is made out of primitives doesn't mean it's the same as a voxel enginel.
The only game that had a Voxel engine was Outcast. Outcast looked very different from regular games at the time, it looks immensely more detailed, if a game uses a Voxel engine...you can actually tell.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Originally posted by Adjuvant1 I don't entirely understand your argument, so it's difficult to refute. Are you arguing the definition of "voxel"? Are you arguing Outcast has a proprietary trademark over "voxels"? Are you saying "games that use voxels must look like Outcast? What are you saying here?
Voxels are 3 dimensional pixels.
EQnext uses small polygons.
Voxels are not rendered through the graphics card, when Sauer made the Outcast Voxel engine, he mentioned the downsides, the downside of a voxel engine is that everything is rendered through the CPU it is sent to the GPU frame buffer and rendered like that.
That is a pretty... remedial... definition of "voxel".
At least you admit it is a voxel and you can't take that back.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Originally posted by Adjuvant1 I don't entirely understand your argument, so it's difficult to refute. Are you arguing the definition of "voxel"? Are you arguing Outcast has a proprietary trademark over "voxels"? Are you saying "games that use voxels must look like Outcast? What are you saying here?
Voxels are 3 dimensional pixels.
EQnext uses small polygons.
Voxels are not rendered through the graphics card, when Sauer made the Outcast Voxel engine, he mentioned the downsides, the downside of a voxel engine is that everything is rendered through the CPU it is sent to the GPU frame buffer and rendered like that.
That is a pretty... remedial... definition of "voxel".
At least you admit it is a voxel and you can't take that back.
I don't understand this post. Who admits and what's your point?
Originally posted by Dullahan Lol, what a ridiculous thread. It reminds me of kids arguing a game isn't a "sandbox mmo" because it has some feature like quests or pve.
Originally posted by Dullahan Lol, what a ridiculous thread. It reminds me of kids arguing a game isn't a "sandbox mmo" because it has some feature like quests or pve.
+2
People disagree what a "sandbox" is because of developer hype and general genre ignorance. I mentioned on the first page of this thread I'd understand the point of view, basically, "EQN is being hyped as a voxel game, and it may be untrue if you can show me evidence, I'm listening". No one has, as a matter of fact the evidence they presented was erroneous, easily correctable with 2 minutes of research. EQN has enough problems with genuine dislike from differences in opinion and taste, it doesn't need lies spoken against it.
edit: after re-reading, I corrected "EQN is being hyped as a sandbox" to "EQN is being hyped as a voxel game".
The whole fail is creating threads on whether it's voxel OR sandbox at all. Nothing better to do with your lives?
The fact that anyone thought about whether it was true voxel or not or that a game that claims to be a sandbox or not is just more lame sauce around here.
Try debating the true merits of a game instead. Stop wasting yours and our time....
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
The whole fail is creating threads on whether it's voxel OR sandbox at all. Nothing better to do with your lives?
The fact that anyone thought about whether it was true voxel or not or that a game that claims to be a sandbox or not is just more lame sauce around here.
Try debating the true merits of a game instead. Stop wasting yours and our time....
Haha. He cries about people discussing games in a game discussion forum, complaining about what he considers complaining, and says we're wasting time because we have nothing better to do. Real winner, there.
Haha. He cries about people discussing games in a game discussion forum, complaining about what he considers complaining, and says we're wasting time because we have nothing better to do. Real winner, there.
Originally posted by Adjuvant1 I don't entirely understand your argument, so it's difficult to refute. Are you arguing the definition of "voxel"? Are you arguing Outcast has a proprietary trademark over "voxels"? Are you saying "games that use voxels must look like Outcast? What are you saying here?
Voxels are 3 dimensional pixels.
EQnext uses small polygons.
Voxels are not rendered through the graphics card, when Sauer made the Outcast Voxel engine, he mentioned the downsides, the downside of a voxel engine is that everything is rendered through the CPU it is sent to the GPU frame buffer and rendered like that.
That is a pretty... remedial... definition of "voxel".
At least you admit it is a voxel and you can't take that back.
I don't understand this post. Who admits and what's your point?
The whole fail is creating threads on whether it's voxel OR sandbox at all. Nothing better to do with your lives?
The fact that anyone thought about whether it was true voxel or not or that a game that claims to be a sandbox or not is just more lame sauce around here.
Try debating the true merits of a game instead. Stop wasting yours and our time....
I actually found the entire thread interesting and would rather read this than 98% of the garbage on Reddit or elsewhere.
The whole fail is creating threads on whether it's voxel OR sandbox at all. Nothing better to do with your lives?
The fact that anyone thought about whether it was true voxel or not or that a game that claims to be a sandbox or not is just more lame sauce around here.
Try debating the true merits of a game instead. Stop wasting yours and our time....
Haha. He cries about people discussing games in a game discussion forum, complaining about what he considers complaining, and says we're wasting time because we have nothing better to do. Real winner, there.
You win this thread. There is no reason for anyone to continue.
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.
Comments
Why does it matter?
Are you the voxel police?
Will the game be any better or worse with voxels?
Will you start a class action lawsuit against SOE once the game gets boring because they misrepresented the game to you?*
*Having them misuse the term may give you a back door to a refund.
I say, oversell it, flat out lie, et al... the game will still be so been there done that no matter if they give us the truth or not. Let the fabrications begin!
By the way, just to clear things up. Voxels can be rendered in a variety of ways, including polygons. Cubic environents are often a polygonal representation of a voxel dataset. I never looked into minecraft but it looks like a perfect example of voxels rendered with polygons as cubes. You can also render voxels by transforming them to smoother polygon meshes with algorithms such as marching cubes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
Volume datasets from CTs or MRIs are also stored as voxels and often rendered with raycasting:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycasting#mediaviewer/File:High_Definition_Volume_Rendering.JPG
Unlike stated before, this can and is often done on the GPU. The voxels are send to the GPU as 3D texture.
Voxel quest (http://www.voxelquest.com/) is a pretty cool voxel project where, as of now, the voxels are rendered as screen aligned squares or circles. Or in the case of water, raycasting as far as I know.
Also, there is no unlimited detail (except, maybe, with proceduraly generated datasets, like. fractals). Coarse voxel worlds can be rendered in a smooth way but that's not an unlimited amount of detail, it's a nice way to render a very low amount of detail. More detailed voxel datasets tend to need enormous amounts of space and rendering performance and as such they are also limited by hardware and algorithms.
No, EQ Next does not use a Voxel graphics engine. No major video game since Outcast does.
But nearly every video game graphics engine does use voxels in some way.
Games like Call of Duty will use voxels to render bullet holes in walls.
So, in EQ Next if you build a wall it will be made of polygons but if you destroy or deform that wall that is when it will use voxels.
Voxel
So if the terrain of a game like EQNext is held in a data array and that is being fed into the mesh builder and the engine can rebuild the mesh at will, then EQNext uses a voxel engine. You can argue all you want, doesn't mean you're right.
I believe that you can't spell believe.
It's a engine designed to smooth out Voxels and add texture to them.. or something like that, the guy who created it has plenty of vids to watch that explain the tech. I believe EQN is using it. Search Voxel Farm Engine on youtube.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
"Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to computer games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the VoxelSpace engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine". The engine is purely software-based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)
You guys need to stop using Outcast as the example. It did basically the same thing EQN does.
The OP and you are almost right there, EQN uses a voxel grid to render terrain polygons because GPU's are optimized to render polygons. These voxels are invisible and only serve as anchor points to create the polygons. I have worked with similar engines and EQ is not a pure Voxel engine like Outcast but it does use what is called sparse voxel rendering to create similar results with a marching cubes algorithm.
Here is an example for a marching cubes algorithm and how these Voxel anchor points are used to deform the terrain. Every Voxel that does not have it's default grid value creates additional polygons via a generic algorithm that can be implemented in GPU shaders. This is a relatively effective way to produce a decent looking terrain but has severe limitations due to the amount of memory used to store all the voxels. This is one reason you see chunks of terrain pop in with most voxel based games:
EQN uses a standard marching cubes engine but unfortunately they have not solved the performance or memory issues that come with it and instead opted to reduce the grid on distant objects which creates very unattractive looking massive blocks all over the terrain.
I have uninsstalled EQ Landmark but if anyone want's to see what i mean i can install it and make some secreenshots to show you the horrible looking effect on distant objects. Something they hide in their marketing shots by either not having distant objects or cranking up the engine detail for the one screenshot which is however not a setting you can get more than 10 FPS even with a 980 GPU.
How many Voxels can dance on the head of a pin!!??
I have been told it is 31.....
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
no.
edit: edited for sense of humor. not everyone appreciates Oblivion guard quotes.
A voxel is just a point in 3d space. A single coordinate that can be used as an anchor for the decal of a bullet hole. Using voxels gives you very accurate bullet holes.
Voxels are used as approximations for many things. For example, you can create very realistic looking clouds even with a very coarse grid and a special render algorithm.
Left: sparse voxel grid. Right: with cloud shader applied.
I just came in here to say: "EQNext uses voxels"
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
At least you admit it is a voxel and you can't take that back.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
I don't understand this post. Who admits and what's your point?
+2
People disagree what a "sandbox" is because of developer hype and general genre ignorance. I mentioned on the first page of this thread I'd understand the point of view, basically, "EQN is being hyped as a voxel game, and it may be untrue if you can show me evidence, I'm listening". No one has, as a matter of fact the evidence they presented was erroneous, easily correctable with 2 minutes of research. EQN has enough problems with genuine dislike from differences in opinion and taste, it doesn't need lies spoken against it.
edit: after re-reading, I corrected "EQN is being hyped as a sandbox" to "EQN is being hyped as a voxel game".
The whole fail is creating threads on whether it's voxel OR sandbox at all. Nothing better to do with your lives?
The fact that anyone thought about whether it was true voxel or not or that a game that claims to be a sandbox or not is just more lame sauce around here.
Try debating the true merits of a game instead. Stop wasting yours and our time....
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
Haha. He cries about people discussing games in a game discussion forum, complaining about what he considers complaining, and says we're wasting time because we have nothing better to do. Real winner, there.
+3
He said no takesies backsies.
I actually found the entire thread interesting and would rather read this than 98% of the garbage on Reddit or elsewhere.
You win this thread. There is no reason for anyone to continue.
Just to question the philosophy. Army of Socrates.