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jute

Voxel Enemies in Shadow Warrior Beta

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DooMAD said:

Yay, voxels! Sadly all the Doom Port devs find the idea unfeasible.

More like "pointless". Some ports support models, and more people are making models than voxels. Adding voxel support would be a gratuitous feature, added just for showing they can, which would be never used.

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"Pointless" would be a matter of opinion. I'm sure if they were available as an option, plenty of people would use them. I know I'm not the only one who thinks that models don't "fit" Doom very well, as evidenced by every thread on Doomworld about voxels having a whole train of people saying so.

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I like voxels but don't I think models coupled with software rendering a la Quake steers too far away from doom's original feel. They start to look pixelated at a minor distance.

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DooMAD said:

"Pointless" would be a matter of opinion.



Indeed. And from a coder's point of view it's a waste of time. Lots of work for little gain. There's more than enough reasons why nobody bothers, not the least of which is that real models are much easier to make than voxels so they are much more worthwile to support.

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Heh - blur-o-vision. While it's an interesting find I don't know that I'd want to play a game with enemies that look like they stepped out of an impressionist painting.

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Csonicgo said:

I can see Voxels being used for item pickups.

They work perfectly for this purpose, as seen in Shadow Warrior and Blood. Using them for fast moving monsters wouldn't really have any advantages over models and would probably be much harder to work with.

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arrrgh said:

Voxels are cool. They're pixelated... but in 3d


That's exactly why I like 'em. These weapons look great, in my opinion (while the objects with curved faces are a bit iffy). But, of course, a model of identical appearance can be easily made.

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Voxels are a pain in the ass to code and I think pound-for-pound require more CPU than polygons. It's an interesting concept, though. The only games I've seen actually implementing them are Alpha Centauri and Blood.

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Shadow Warrior had them too. And the first Delta Force game used Voxels for the terrain. As well as C&C2: Tiberian Sun which used them for the vehicles.

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*facepalm*

I always though voxels were just sprites with X number of different angles, like the stimpacks in KDiZD.

I see now they are actually more like a 3D arrangement of pixels.

I'd love to see something like this in Doom, but I think they would lose alot of their charm in maps not made for them. I know due to the sprite-based nature of items I just plonk them down facing whatever direction, and I'm sure the majority of people over the last 15 years have done the same.

Forcing most maps to use voxels and would likely end up with alot of medkits, weapons and ammo facing odd angles away from the player.

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Super Jamie said:

*facepalm*

I always though voxels were just sprites with X number of different angles, like the stimpacks in KDiZD.


Haha, I always thought that looked pretty stupid.

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Needlessly CPU intensive. Near impossible to work with, no real hardware acceleration...while not exactly the same, it would be better to implement a "draw model to buffer -> draw buffer as billboard" mechanism to current ports for that blocky "not quite real" look. You could even define the amount of rotation steps, the degree of animation interpolation, perspective correction or simple orthogonal rendering, how lights interact if at all, etc...

No idea why no one has tried this. (copyright 2009 Zaldron)

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Are you saying to render models into sprites in real time? That would be... something.

I would really like to see those voxel enemies in action to get a feel for them. I wonder if those Shadow Warrior alpha resource can be used in the full version... Is Shadow Warrior capable of replacing any sprite with a voxel?

I doubt we will ever see voxels in Doom simply because it's a lot of effort just for some 3D pickups. Given the difficulty in making traditional models that capture the Doom feel, making voxel enemies seems totally infeasible.

Oh, and obligatory Voxlap link (can't believe it hasn't come up yet).

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Shadow Warrior by itself probably isn't capable of using voxel enemies, but Jonof's Shadow Warrior port might be able to.

Zaldron said:

Needlessly CPU intensive. Near impossible to work with, no real hardware acceleration...while not exactly the same, it would be better to implement a "draw model to buffer -> draw buffer as billboard" mechanism to current ports for that blocky "not quite real" look. You could even define the amount of rotation steps, the degree of animation interpolation, perspective correction or simple orthogonal rendering, how lights interact if at all, etc...

Or you could take pictures of the model instead and save all that work. :p

It's a cool idea, and I believe Trespasser actually used an "image caching" system that worked in a very similar way, taking distant objects and turning them into sprites to save on CPU resources. Too bad the game itself was a buggy mess.

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@Zaldron: That technique isn't new, although I don't think it's been tried for voxels yet. See imposters and polyposters.

The problem with voxels is there's no real benefit besides their pixelated look. Voxel-based terrain can be faster than triangle-mesh terrain, but only at the cost of limiting degrees of motion/view.

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Scet said:

@Zaldron: That technique isn't new, although I don't think it's been tried for voxels yet. See imposters and polyposters.

The problem with voxels is there's no real benefit besides their pixelated look. Voxel-based terrain can be faster than triangle-mesh terrain, but only at the cost of limiting degrees of motion/view.

No voxels, I was strictly talking about rendering polys. While not new in the context of LOD optimizations, I meant "no one tried this yet" strictly in the confines of 2.5D engines, where one may wish for higher resolution sprites, alpha-blending and more fluid animations without rapidly destroying sensible storage and memory budgets (ever did a calculation for your standard sprite-packed game with 2x, 4x the resolution, 16/32 unique angles and 32bit images? It rapidly explodes into modern game requirements).

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Cryengine 2 uses voxels for the terrain. It's definitely not obsolete technology.

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Nomad said:

Cryengine 2 uses voxels for the terrain. It's definitely not obsolete technology.

The terrain volumes are reduced to polys. The voxels are never rendered. Think of it as a sculpting tool they use to customize portions of the scenery (carving detail out of the more commonly used heightmaps, which don't inmediately allow for "concave" terrain).

Voxels as a data asset rather than a rendering device are used for many things. But it's easier to just call them 3D textures in this case.

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I will personally buy a drink for anyone who can find the VERY EARLY screenshots or resources on Doom64 beta.

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david_a said:

Since you're begging the question - what was different in the early Doom64 betas?


Everything. It looked like a completely different game. Elbryan42 knows more about it than I do...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1x6b2PJvWc

Looks... fantastic.

If the case were to just use voxels for items, why not use the technology already implemented in current ports. 3d modeled items are not so much out of place as their moving counterparts. I think more or less the reason the enemies looks so out of place is not so much the models themselves, but the clumsy animations. Not on the modelers part, but how the actors move themselves. Stand-Walk-Stop-Shoot-Walk-Die doesn't translate well outside of the sprited world IMHO. Where a model could be fluid and dynamic, adding character to an entity (a limp, swagger or ducking/dodging) Doom's cannon fodder don't cut the mustard. The modeled enemies essentially come across as lobotomized and a bit statuesq. I think in using voxels, there would be a relatively similar, underwhelming result.

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