Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 8 - Final Words by (21 February 2000) | Return to The Archives

Special Thanks

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

The Future of Voxel Landscape Engines

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.

Article Series:

> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 1 - Introduction
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 2 - Rendering the Landscape's Structure
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 3 - Texture and Lighting
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 4 - Level of Detail and Optimisation
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 5 - Quality Improvement
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 6 - Hardware Acceleration
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 7 - The Engine
> - Realtime Voxel Landscape Engines - Part 8 - Final Words

Copyright 1999-2008 (C) FLIPCODE.COM and/or the original content author(s). All rights reserved.
Please read our Terms, Conditions, and Privacy information.