Voxelstein 3D

http://voxelstein3d.sourceforge.net/

Has anyone else played this before? I just found out about it today and it's kinda neat. It feels a bit buggy and I wasn't able to beat it or anything, but it's interesting to play with nonetheless.

it's really stupid and the author is also stupid
took forever to find him a coder and his voxel>polys propaganda and self promotion posting is aggravating

Hah game was tight man. Talk about it, I only got past the first level then I had to reformat my PC. I think Wolfen Doom is better. However, I didn't know we had some Volxenstein players here. The author was an average coder, the graphics was the best part. The game was good, but it was kinda hilarious.

The first screenshot has a voxelized photo of some holocaust victims.

Now that is fucking CLASS.

Amazing.

The screenshots for this basically demonstrate why voxels are an inferior technology and never stood a chance.

The engine concept is interesting (I remember the cave demo for Voxlap), but it feels outdated. I do like the destructible environments, though.

The levels also feel pretty childish in places.

The furniture and artificial objects mostly look nice, but the characters end up looking like LEGO or Fisher-Price figures.

myk said:

The furniture and artificial objects mostly look nice, but the characters end up looking like LEGO or Fisher-Price figures.

Yes, I first looked at the hanging corpse next to the birdcage and thought it was pretty good, but once I saw a guard I immediately rethought that statement.

I did, however, like the ragdoll effect.

NO HUMAN BEING WOULD STACK BOOKS LIKE THIS


lol, voxels. Ugly characters, and I spent five minutes chipping away at that fucking cell door. The detailed walls and surroundings are kind of cool, but everything else is really, REALLY ugly.

EDIT: Why didn't I try that cheat earlier?

It reminds me of a game set in the Dire Straights: I Want My MTV music video universe.

It sounds interesting though!

I want my voxel Doom objects.

fraggle said:

The screenshots for this basically demonstrate why voxels are an inferior technology and never stood a chance.

They looked kinda "cool" actually when typical game resolutions were much lower than today, and when the alternative was either fast untextured polygons or slow texture mapping, e.g. compare Commanche: Maximum Overkill with Cyberbykes (yeah, sadly this was a 1995 game, not too light on system resources either). Our beloved Doom was really a major exception in visuals quality/performance, unmatched by anything that appeared in its time or that came after it :-)

Also, in the past there was far more room for experimenting with graphics technologies: Check out Ecstatica and its ellipsoid graphics.

But yeah, I'll agree that mainstream 3D acceleration and texture mapping more or less killed everything else off. E.g. up to 1996, even demosceners still considered Phong shading to be "the shit" yet it was totally forgotten just a couple of years later.

Scuba Steve said:

I want my voxel Doom objects.

It's an interesting concept, but I'd prefer if it was used for a completely original game.

Is it just me, or was BJ like 3 ft tall in the game? He should've been as tall as the Nazis.

fraggle said:

The screenshots for this basically demonstrate why voxels are an inferior technology and never stood a chance.

Or why Voxels were, and are, never used intelligently.

The only game I ever played that used voxels extensively was Alpha Centauri. They worked really well, since the game was like Civilization with a 3d map, and if they used pixels, they would have gone through terrain and such instead of snapping to it. I didn't even notice they WERE voxels until after about a year of playing.

C&C Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun used a lot of voxels for their vehicle units

Maybe someday when we can make voxels the size of molecules within the game engine, they'll be truly viable ;)

The dopefish lives.

I think this proves that Voxels for Doom is possible. I'd be very interested seeing a monster, or preferably all of them, from doom. Brought over as Voxels. Just because these characters aren't that good, doesn't mean that it's not possible.

Those screenshots remind me of Quake 2 in a way.

I like this wolfenstein clone for a bit, it just got boring when I went into that hall. That hall in the first level scares me :O. The game was fun, kinda scary too lol.

Interesting engine. Somebody should use it to make a game that doesn't suck.

The engine kind of reminds me of this game:
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2007/09/spout.html
It has destructible 2D voxels.

Creaphis said:

It has destructible 2D voxels.

Aren't those just pixels then? Voxels are known as volume pixels because they are cubes rather than flat boxes like pixels.

I forgot to mention this in my previous post. What is the cheat code for this?

caco_killer said:

I forgot to mention this in my previous post. What is the cheat code for this?

I pity you.

MIL or LIM or ILM or such all held down all at once.

Fiend said:

I pity you.

MIL or LIM or ILM or such all held down all at once.

Uh, thanks? I don't really know Wolfenstein codes.

Quasar said:

Maybe someday when we can make voxels the size of molecules within the game engine, they'll be truly viable ;)

This was what I was going to say. Wouldnt they be viable option if they were done at a decent resolution? I understand that would exponentially increase render times, but, eh. Look at the way Hardware is going.

AirRaid: If that were possible, it'd be a very good solution for standardization of the geometry with advantages in both visuals and physics.

One of the big problems with voxels is the data structure used to hold them... Sure you could render something nice if you have enough voxels, but how do you store that? If you had to keep track of every one of them it would be gigantic. That is similar to the problem that real-time raytracing has - raytracing itself is well understood (and Intel's mythical version is supposed to be damn fast), but storing all that data efficiently is not.