Comment by reactordev
2 days ago
Voxels have been around since the 1980s. The smoothness came from that beautiful CRT and its inability to display crisp images. Normals weren’t really used until early 90s and used heavily by games like Comanche by NovaLogic.
The reason why Minecraft voxels are blocks is because Notch (Markus Persson) famously said he was “Not good at art”. He didn’t implement the triangulation and kept them unit blocks. Games that had voxels AND were triangulated that came before Minecraft were Red Faction, Delta Force, Outcast just to name a few.
The point is, voxels aren’t anything special, no more than a texel, or a vertex, or a splat, a normal, or a uv. It’s just a representation of 3D space (occupied/not occupied) and can just as easily be used for culling as it can for rendering. The Minecraft style because popular because it reminds people of pixels, it reminded people of legos, and Minecraft was so popular
It depends on how the voxels relate to the gameplay.
Regardless of the original intent, in Minecraft the voxel grid itself is a very important aspect of the core gameplay loop. Smoothing the voxel visual representation disguises the boundaries between individual logical voxels and makes certain gameplay elements more difficult or frustrating for the player. When the visuals closely (or exactly) match the underlying voxel grid, it's easy for the player to see which specific voxel is holding back some lava or if they're standing on the voxel they're about to break.
In Minecraft you can, for example, clearly count how many voxels wide something is from a distance, because the voxels are visually obvious.
In Red Faction, you're never concerned with placing or breaking very specific voxels in very specific locations, so it's not an issue.
So your point is, Minecraft uses voxels on a unit scale. Red faction uses voxels differently, so Minecraft wins?
I get the appeal of Minecraft but Notch didn’t invent this stuff as much as you would love to believe. He simply used it in a way that made it easy to understand. To the point where people like you are explaining it to me like I have never played it. I have. I was one of the first testers.
Almost all of Minecraft is ripped off other games. World creation, dwarf fortress. Mining, dig dug. The only original thing was The Creeper.
This seems like a needlessly antagonistic response? GP was only pointing out that the voxel shape is fundamentally important to Minecraft. It's not just a matter of Notch's artistic talent, as you said.
Anyway I don't think anybody is saying Notch invented this stuff or Minecraft was the first to do certain things. But it's probably worth pointing out that, ripped off or no, those other games haven't become remotely close to the popularity of Minecraft, so Notch clearly did something right... maybe the Creepers are why?
> So your point is, Minecraft uses voxels on a unit scale. Red faction uses voxels differently, so Minecraft wins?
What? That’s not my point at all.
> it reminded people of legos,
I don't think this should be understated. LEGO are easy and fun to build with and don't require a lot of artistic talent. The same goes for block-based games like Minecraft.