Voxel Doom Port!

So now I know that the blocky looking models used in the Blood game are voxels.

kingbob said:

How's this coming?

There's a new voxel-based game out called Voxatron that comes with a nifty-looking voxel editor. But it's made specifically for the game. Don't know if it can be of any use.

I've been about as productive as a dead sloth the last few months. Mapping, voxels, etc all came grinding to a halt. Seems strange that all the other contributors seemed to stop at the same time, heh. Maybe my lethargy is contagious.

No, i've just been working on my Duke Nukem 3D voxel pack. If you want i could make a few more things for Doom.

DooMAD said:

The only real problem at the moment is the Voxel editors themselves. Neither Slab6 or Voxel3D are ideally suited to the work for various reasons. I'll have to give some other ones out there a try to see if there's anything better.

You could try out Cubicle Constructor.
http://www.minddesk.com/

reaperman said:

No, i've just been working on my Duke Nukem 3D voxel pack. If you want i could make a few more things for Doom.

All contributions are still welcome. I'm grateful for all help offered in getting this done.

sgtcrispy said:

You could try out Cubicle Constructor.
http://www.minddesk.com/

Pleasantly surprised it works under win2k, heh. Might take me a while to get used to it, but I'll see if it's any better than what I've been using so far. Cheers.

Do you guys have any suggestions for me on how to go about getting correctly proportioned screenshots of these things (in relation to the doom sprites) with rotations? Like, basically I want to get the size of the screenshot down 1:1 like the Doom sprite, but then be able to simply keep rotating the voxel in front of me 45 degrees.

Any suggestions on the best way to go about this?

My initial solution would be to capture it from Slab6 (or other program) with the sprite opened in a image viewer beside the Voxel window. The (,/.) (rCtrl/Num0) (up/down) and (pgup/pgdown) keys let you rotate and move it to the roughly correct angle. You can double the window size for a 2x resolution capture too, if needed.

EDIT: And you may need to adjust the height/width ratio of the slab6 window to make sure the voxel isn't too close to the camera when capturing, resulting in too much of a fov skew.

After spending the last 30 mins on the Lego website I wonder what voxel creations shown here could make the transition to Lego? Maybe the armors or weapons (bfg).

This thread is huge, and I don't wanna verify if this question has been posed already...so, will it have destructible environments?

No.

Hmm...could still be interesting, though I was really hoping for voxel-esque destructible environments. Heh, I can only imagine what kind of secrets or puzzles could be hidden in a destructible map. Anyways, good luck with the project!

You've got to understand that there are two different things in play here:

1. A rendering engine that displays the world.
2. A physics engine that simulates the world.


Voxels, just like the vanilla sprites or the DMD/MD2/MD3 models supported by some source ports, are purely the domain of the rendering engine. As far as the internals of the worldsim goes, there could be pretty much nothing displayed, or a single square column corresponding to the hitbox, or everything could be an imp. Doesn't matter.

Adding voxel support is therefore just a question of letting the rendering engine use voxels instead of sprites.

If you want destructible environments, however, you can't change only the rendering engine. You'll need to have the physics engine take them into account too. And this would need a system entirely different from the BSP nodes/sectors/linedefs one from Doom.

It is possible to completely replace the rendering engine and still leave the physics engine mostly unmodified. This is what allows OpenGL ports to still play like Doom, despite using a radically different method to display the game. But if you want voxel-based environments, you need to rewrite the physics engine entirely. You'd have to read the maps and translate them into a voxel-based structure. The gameplay would change radically because you'd have to approximate Doom's idiosyncrasies from a completely different system, which would be as hard as trying to replicate software rendering with an OpenGL renderer.

Will/can the monster sprite be redone as voxels too?

Brewtal_Legend said:

Will/can the monster sprite be redone as voxels too?

As far as I know it's possible, but animating voxels is quite painful. Expect choppy animation of the monsters like you'd see in original Quake. Unless someone will be bothered to code a voxel position interpolator or something like that.

TomoAlien said:

As far as I know it's possible, but animating voxels is quite painful. Expect choppy animation of the monsters like you'd see in original Quake. Unless someone will be bothered to code a voxel position interpolator or something like that.

The animations would be exactly the same as the sprites if done properly, so it wouldn't seem any more choppy than what we're used to seeing already.

It's definitely possible to make them, just not particularly practical. Would take a bit of a superhuman effort using the programs we have at the moment. Still need to look a bit deeper into Qubicle Constructor, which does seem to be an improvement over Voxel3D, although it's still not going to eliminate the tedium of doing a block by block recreation of the originals.

We could do it the half-arsed way and just convert some MD2 models into voxels, but that's not really what we're looking to accomplish, as it wouldn't match the style of the original sprites.

I cant wait for a voxel source port!
I tested the vox-zdoom port last year and was awesome, I don't know why stop there the developing for that sorce port... :(

Dialy wait for a new version of some voxel port, good luck!

PD: Sorry for my very bad english.

Your English is better than a lot of native English speakers.

The problem with this voxel port as well as any "hi-res" sprite projects that pop up now and then with predictable patterns, is that they imply a huge amount of manual groundwork, and there are no accounts -yet- of anyone actually reaching to the bitter end of any such endeavor.

Duke3d has a hi-res pack that (from what I hear) is pretty complete. Doom seems to have a much bigger community.

I want to make a Lego BFG. Any completed voxel models of it I can steal from?

qoncept said:

Duke3d has a hi-res pack that (from what I hear) is pretty complete. Doom seems to have a much bigger community.

My first google result for "duke3d hires pack" gives a pack that uses hires textures on the level plus textured models to replace sprite things. This isn't so surprising, and the doom community has done at least as much (get a texture pack plus a model pack). What maes is referring to is actual hires drawn sprites (not models) to replace every doom sprite. I've seen a few attempts at that come and go.

Yeah, the current voxel pack for ZDoom is quite exhaustive as far as static objects go. The weapons are all there.

The stuff that's been made is outstanding - very nice addition to the cult of Doom.
I'm not to keen on monsters that may be half assed due to enormous amounts of work required.
So far it's awesome.

Before you make too big of an effort, decide what you want out of the effort. Is it supposed to render more realistically, are body parts supposed to be removable, are walls supposed to be breakable into individual bricks. Make sure you provide directly for that goal. Otherwise you will spend considerable time developing something only to discover it is slower and more limited than the alternatives.

If you are doing a government project to prove the principal, then go ahead.
Nuclear simulations are so slow because they involve the whole 3D volume, like voxels, and those programs run for weeks on supercomputers.

To avoid that problem, need to cull the hidden voxels severely not only from display but from the physics engine, and create them on the fly as they become useful.
Starts looking like a frame and skin model then, but it would be more practical. It can still have any behaviors that you want to design in.

wesleyjohnson said:

Before you make too big of an effort, decide what you want out of the effort. Is it supposed to render more realistically, are body parts supposed to be removable, are walls supposed to be breakable into individual bricks.

For a Doom engine project, such things are practically out of question. The idea is to replace sprites by voxels, and that is only a change in the renderer.

If you want to destroy individual voxel "cubes", then you run into two large problems:

1. How would a destroyed voxel from POSSA translate to POSSB? How would the engine know which voxel maps where? You'd have to in fact use a model-like system where actors are animated by having their voxels move around, instead of the frame-based system used by Doom. That means that you'd have to abandon the state-frame parity, too.
2. You'd have to have the entire physics engine completely rewritten. You'd also need to do away with the entire BSP scheme if you decide that walls can be destroyed, since the player would then be able to simply carve a new path.

In short, you wouldn't make a Doom engine for voxels, or a voxel engine for Doom. You'd make an entirely new game which, as a gimmick, is able to load Doom data even if it doesn't play anything like Doom.


Therefore, the only sane approach as far as a Doom engine goes is to have voxel models as indestructibles as sprites and textures are.

Gez said:

In short, you wouldn't make a Doom engine for voxels, or a voxel engine for Doom. You'd make an entirely new game which, as a gimmick, is able to load Doom data even if it doesn't play anything like Doom.

Minecraft? :-p

A voxel port sounds awesome.

I agree that things like destructible walls and other environments seem highly unnecessary and would probably break the gameplay of the game and make it quite unbalanced. Why would you need a key or flip a switch if you could just blow a hole through the wall or door to the exit?

Enemy sprites as voxels definitely sounds like a cool idea, but it seems like it would ultimately not be worth it due to the labor needed to make them as close to perfect as possible. And now that I think of it, would making enemy sprites voxels make them jagged like the enemies in voxatron?

I think the way it is going now by making the items, switches, and other little touches voxel based adds just the perfect amount of extra detail to make Doom that more awesome.

How will the barrels be handled? Will the explode into voxels or just use the explosion sprites? Seems like they might be the most difficult element to implement.

Is there a list of what has been finished and what is still "to-do?"

Brewtal_Legend said:

Is there a list of what has been finished and what is still "to-do?"

The credits should be in the zip to say who made what. I guess for the sake of being organised I should put together a to-do list. The main one I'd like to see done at the moment is that damned paradox of a chaingun.

Anyone make the chaingun yet?

reaperman said:

Anyone make the chaingun yet?

In all honesty, if I stopped being a perfectionist it would probably be done already. The problem lies in the fact that the chaingun should (based on the hudsprite and the former commando's sprites) have more than 4 barrels, but there isn't actually enough room on the pickup sprite for more than 4 unless they're not round, or the gun itself isn't round.

But I doubt people are going to be looking that closely, so I should just make it with 4 barrels and quit making excuses, heh.

I could try making one. I think i got an idea on how to make it.