Comment by voidUpdate
8 months ago
It always mildly annoys me when a game says that it is all voxels, but clearly isn't, since the little cubes easily move off the voxel grid. Its just geometry moving around, like normal games, but modelled in little cubes, instead of being fully restricted to voxels. I would really like to see a fully voxel game, where all geometry is "rendered" to voxel space before being rendered to the screen, so that everything is just cubes that don't move, just change colour
John Lin used to work on such an engine where all voxels stay axis and grid aligned, even in animations:
https://x.com/ProgrammerLin/status/1342786223811698688 https://voxely.net/blog/
But I think the project was abandoned in 2021.
While Voxile has off-grid blocks of voxels for monsters etc, it is much more serious about being on-grid for everything else. The entire world is entirely on-grid, single size voxels, you can only place aligned objects, and rotate in 4 directions. These voxels only every exist as voxels, never as polygons.
In contrast with most voxel-looking games, which are actually meshes converted from voxel inputs, placed at arbitrary locations with arbitrary scale.
When I started this project, I actually prototyped what it would take to have moving objects in-world as aligned voxels, but the animation was too jerky and it was too limited. Would have been an interesting "style" suitable for some games (strategy games?) but none with fast paced realtime combat.
Lexaloffle's Voxatron is what you're describing: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php
IMO the effect is less compelling than you might think.
looks great to me, if that little gif is anything to go by
Are you suggesting the voxel grid is attached to the camera, or that the camera moves through the grid?
Either could work, but world space voxels would probably be easier to understand than camera space