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What are Voxels and why are they so cool?
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- čas přidán 17. 08. 2024
- John Lin's channel: / @johnlin9665
Voxel graphics use a completely different way of modeling and rendering objects in games than we're used to seeing in modern AAA games. A huge majority of video games use Polygons to render the visuals. These are millions of tiny triangles connected together to form surfaces. Voxels, or volumetric pixels, don't use any triangles but are instead tiny cubes (3D pixels) grouped together to form objects that have actual volume. Voxels were mostly used in the 90s with games such as Outcast, but have barely evolved since, unlike Polygons which continue to push boundaries with projects like Unreal Engine 5. The only notable example of a recent Voxel based game is Teardown, but John Lin's ray traced procedurally generated sandbox physics based voxel game looks promising.
hey old video getting views again for no reason gang, watch my new stuff and join my budding discord discord.com/invite/g8s5KGZTFq
ok 👍
You can't make me! ...alright i'll try
i got this recommended again 2 years later, and I still am wondering what ever happened to John Lin
@@Rispy from what i know he's continuing work on project
Roger that
Really awesome video. You nailed all of the explanations and it was entertaining too. Thanks for enjoying my work enough to share it around :)
glad you liked the vid! looking forward to covering your game in the future ;)
There he is! How's the engine coming along?
Woah, i didn't expect you here.
I am just interested, have you ever heard of Vangers?
Youre probably already working on it but you could have some kind of tool to instance voxels with primitive shapes(Cube,Sphere,Plane) that is resizable ie uses more stored "voxel material" of type dirt/rock/etc
Fun fact: Teardown, despite rendering voxels, actually first renders each group of voxels (like the whole car body or each wheel or whatever) as the back-faces of a cube to mask out the voxel area and just render that. Makes it more efficient than trying to render the entire screen for just those voxels.
At the same time, many of the fancy global illumination and reflection effects in Unreal Engine 5 work by representing the scene as essentially voxels.
Occlusion and culling are kind of table stakes for a 3d game engine.
I'm curious about the second part though. How is UE5 using voxels?
@@DanKaschel They definitely are, though the ironic part is that the objects still use triangles, even if it's just to figure out the biggest possible area necessary to tell if an object can be seen there.
UE5's Lumen system for reflections and GI essentially converts the entire scene into a voxelized representation. There's a bunch of complicated stuff that goes into it that I couldn't explain, but it essentially reconstructs the entire scene with voxels and then traces against that to figure out lighting.
No clue what you just said, but I totally agree
@@danielstroup8777 the magic of voxels man. Only a select few know how much they influence the broader industry. I love voxels, without them we would be stuck with raytracing as the only 3D real time global illumination solution. Essentially to break it down, most voxel based GI solutions turn the scene into voxels, then cast out rays that bounce, but instead of checking for collisions every unit on the raycast, it checks for them every voxel, making it 100x faster. I skimmed over a lot of details but hopefully someone will understand my pointless blabbering, I mainly work with game engines and haven't really dabbled in making my own lighting solution. But I still make games so I have a basic understanding of this stuff
@@gerblesh_674 I've made some fun experiments with rendering including voxel GI and I can confirm, that stuff is amazing.
I don't mind sacrificing resolution for physics simulations. In his demo, it looks like art though. I can't wait to play it. Anyway good video, I'm gonna look at more of your videos.
thanks for giving my other stuff a watch broski, much appreciated
I just care about that it shouldn't look obvious that they are made out of cubes and I'm OK
I didn't really get it, what exactly are voxels for if Minecraft doesn't need them? What can a voxel based game do that Minecraft can't?
@@Minecraftzocker135 well it is easier to render destructible terrain because when you damage a go el rock for example it can show you it’s innards easier than a polygon based rock you have to either predefine how the rock breaks or find an algorithmic way to simulate how it would behave with voxels they can naturally have the simulation built in like in tear down when you break something every voxel has its own physics as other wise you would have had to preprogram how the object would behave once destroyed as there is a limit to how many objects can exist
YoOoo
"What are voxels? 3D pixels."
Video ends.
Jokes aside, pretty interesting video. I remember following an old blog detailing someone's experience with voxels in gaming. The blog died in 2010 after cube world was launched, no correlation but it's pretty curious. Also ken silverman did something with voxels too, and I also hope someone will take a voxel engine and make a 3D terraria game in there.
what are Voxels
Minecraft rendered games
@@veretxnerd983 funnily enough, Minecraft doesn't actually use voxels in it's engine
cube world, abandonware that should have never been abandonware
Trove is one of the games that come to my mind when people talks about voxels
Personally I have given some thought to what a 3d terraria would be like, but it is quite difficult to really conceptualise just because of the difference in styles. I think a good example of this is the infamous moon lord laser, difficult to deal with if you don't have a rod of discord and too hard hitting to facetank. How would that translate into 3d game where you can dodge a laser by moving a couple of inches to the left?
By no means am I saying a 3d terraria would be impossible, I think with the right kinds of developers you could create something truly incredible. I just wonder whether it would be similar enough to classic terraria to be called a "sequel" or "redesign" of terraria and not a game "inspired by" terraria (not that that would be a bad thing necessarily).
just wanted to mention that Teardown isn’t just a “destroy everything” type of game. the single player part of the game actually has similar puzzle game features akin to superliminal or portal combined with time trial and speed running. it bothers me that every video of the game on youtube is titled like “THE GAME WHERE YOU CAN DESTORY EVRERUTHING!!!1!” because the game really does have more to offer than that. if you are interested in puzzle games or time trial games i cannot recommend it enough! great video and i hope that voxel based games get more spotlight in the future
Teardown is like getting into a relationship. At first glance, it looks REALLY nice and your interest is captured enough to make you willing to invest some time and see what it's all about. Then when you dig a little deeper, it turns out there are lots of other things about it that make you like it even more, which is ultimately what you end up appreciating it for, but the thing that drew you to it in the first place is still a nice bonus.
@Kenn Honson X how does a game like that hurt you on the inside-
@@bawlstars7857 at some point all those houses you've bulldozed will turn around and bulldoze you right back, surely.
@@andyo3637 It wont bulldoze you, it'll bulldoze your frames.
Imagine a 3D sequel to Noita made in that guy's engine. I'd love to see that.
Dude great idea. "Every pixel is simulated"
My computer would combust just at the first second of playing it
damn i haven't even figured out the lore behind the limanuljaäska
That would be rad! And insane. To play, too.
Ever heard of Teardown
THIS IS SO COOL! What we've seen so far is amazing and I can't wait to see more of John Lin's game. Thanks for telling me about this.
thank you for watching ;)
4:37 I believe the same reason why GPUs are so focused on rendering triangles that they don’t help with voxels is the same reason why almost all 2D games are pixel art instead of vector art, because the former costs less on performance and doesn’t need to change resolution for modern monitors. It’s such a shame that GPUs have ironically limited what graphic styles we can have, there’s many unexplored ideas with voxels and there’s even more unexplored ideas with vector sprites. The ability to scale at any monitor resolution and the ability to resize, rotate, stretch, and even slant sprites with no pixel artifacts is incredible, but the only option was Adobe Flash + actionscript, which was heavily unoptimized for games, and now that flash is gone there’s basically nothing that supports vector sprites.
Vector art and 3D models are pretty similar, though. They're both scalable images made of math, vectors just don't simplify shapes down to triangles. Every vector image can be translated into a (flat) 3D model with an arbitrary degree of detail.
@@Gaswafers true, unfortunately the problem is that when a developer goes 3D, they’re more likely stick to the style of 3D graphics for familiarity and convenience. It doesn’t help that the illusion of curves made by polygons is broken when models are scaled up too large, and if they have textures, they’d have to be bitmap so you get that blur when you enlarge them too much. Ironically, the one game I know where a 3D engine is used for a seemingly 100% 2D game is Shovel Night, which uses an NES pixel art style.
D man
Technology follows easier path of optimization first, there is a reason pixels and triangles were first and why naiive 3D shading was accelerated before raytracing. There are big things happening with voxels and we need a truly massively completely voxel only game to be noticed to have any interest of HW acceleration from the GPU companies. They even added integer scaling support for pixel games.
Godot supports vector sprites
Minecraft started off so simple, imagine how far this could go.
Sadly, little has changed since Minecraft. There are a lot of Minecraft competitors that try to achieve the same, but few that try to improve it. I think TearDown is the logic evolution of the genre, but a decade has passed between them! Maybe the problem is we lack of enough processing power, yet.
@@gustavosantos106 I honestly think that it’s super hard to improve something such as Minecraft, the best improvement there is was Hytale but that shyd never come out.. maybe in the near future there could be realistic teardown or high detailed graphic made out of millions of voxels.. that is if our technology suffice.
@@riardomilos8014 minecraft can be improved on by expanding its world. the current minecraft could be so much better if exploration was a greater element. this is done with the cubic chunks mod, but also john lin's sandbox could potentially change how a world could be structured entirely. I also like Hytale because it adds a lot of depth to exploration as well.
@@kice1102 i mean there's so many animals, creature's, and even biomes that could be in minecraft it boggles me that it hasn't got them already
Mysticxjuice That's partly because there's also the opposing group of people who don't want that to happen, that don't want Minecraft to get too complex or they'll say the game has gone too far or isn't what it used to be anymore, they very well could just add a bunch of stuff like biomes, mobs, structures, whatever but they all need to be fleshed out to some degree, be playable on all devices across both platforms, and not stray too far or be too much. They're in a bit of a particular situation
I'd be interested to hear about how the game-creating-game, "Dreams" fits into this. Dreams doesn't use polygons, it uses "Flecks" which are little 2D elements that look like brush strokes. That seems more similar to voxels than it does to polygons, but also very different still
Without really looking at it, just from that description it's probably polygons. Just a bunch of triangles formed into ribbons.
@@JZStudiosonline I'm not so sure. The developers of the game do explicitly say "Dreams doesn't use polygons". And looking closely at the models, and some of the effects you can do with the flecks, it doesn't seem like it. I'd recommend looking it up, it seems quite fascinating
Its voxels but they have some custom art and render techniques that weren't replicated elsewhere.
What if we start using atoms? Volumetric Circles lol
@@JZStudiosonline It's more like what vector graphics are to pixels if you compare it to voxels.
Oh boy, I hope voxels get the popularity they deserve. Imagine what the future of gaming could be like if voxel evolution caught up to where polygonal gaming stands.
Really well explained. I found John Lin's videos a few months back. He is clearly an awesome programmer. I'm having a go at my own voxel engine. I want to be able to render complex stuff like vegetation. I have something simple going but its fairly basic right now.
Im interested
That's fascinating, really.
I thought that Minecraft will be there forever, but now I am sure that it will be dethroned and abandoned in a decade or two in favor of voxel game that gives even more creative freedom.
Cool channel, keep it up!
Great thing about minecraft is lots of it’s stuff is data based even world gen
i highly doubt it will be "dethroned" and "abandoned" whatever comes out minecraft still has a massive community and insane mechanical depth
No, I doubt it. It's strongest and weakest part is it's simplicity. That's why I want to see this and hytale, they partially at least and discard at most that. I want dynamics, I want to be able to have a world that reacts to me
Minecraft wont ever get dethroned because it can always keep up with whatevers out thanks to its modding community
@@derpaboopderp1286 Yeah no, modding may keep it alive, but it won't keep it at the top. Otherwise skyrim would still be as relevant as it used to be. Minecraft will still be popular for a long time, but that's for the most part not thanks to modding. Modding can't sustain any game by itself, the majority of players don't use mods a lot/at all, it's also done by single users who can't put as much time and effort into it, few modders can be considered professionals, and it's a painstaking and long process with many limitations.
I've been convinced since the first time I saw a video about a voxel tech demo 10-15 years ago that voxels are the future of 3D and that texture mapped polygons are going to be seen as a transitional tech in the future. There's a reason why you see so many games with destructible environments and real-time construction with different material properties be built on voxels, and that is because they can simulate things like brittleness, strength, flexibility, malleability, and other properties much better than flat polygons will ever be able to. Polygons might be able to morph and twist, but this requires some pretty complicated math and approximations of more scientific/ engineering type simulations, which a lot of the time can't be done in real time. So even when you do see that kind of thing in games, they are basically _always_ pre-scripted events and cannot be dynamically calculated on the fly. When you see a wall break apart into pieces, those pieces were pre-modelled and either swapped in when the wall breaks, or else the wall was just always made out of the pieces and when the script triggers then a pre-made animation plays to blast them out of the way or the physics get turned on for those objects.
You don't have to do anything that static with voxels. And the simple reason for this is that voxels are a much closer approximation of how matter works in the real world. Our world is made up of voxels, they're just _really really small_ and we call them "atoms" (subatomic particles don't matter...heh... in this case, they do not have the kinds of physical properties of matter that are important for this kind of simulation.) The way that materials behave in the real world are governed by how these atoms stick to each other. Different bonds between atoms have varying levels of strength, elasticity, and other properties. By using voxels to simulate this, all you are doing is approximating large groups of atoms into large cubes and then simulating these properties over a larger volume. As computers become more powerful, these approximated cubes will shrink until they are smaller than the resolution of our monitors, VR headsets, and occular nerve implant meshes can plot. Once we reach that point, you will see texture mapped polygons transition into being used for things like very distant mountains and trees, orbiting moons, very distant cityscapes, far-away airplanes flying overhead, etc... Or, basically the same things we currently use flat "billboards" for right now. Polygons will go away for mainstream use, and will go into the box of things used for optimization and stylistic reasons, rather than because they are the best tech available.
"As computers become more powerful, these approximated cubes will shrink until they are smaller than the resolution of our monitors, VR headsets, and occular nerve implant meshes can plot"
At that point, we won't need to render voxels as cubes, they can just be one 2d pixel on our screen representing a single point in 3d space, truly removing polygons from the engine. But this seems like it would become a more complicated way of doing what raytracing does, so maybe raytracing is the way to go, once our computers can handle large, complex raytraced worlds. The objects could still be represented by voxel coordinates to make realistic deformation and destruction etc
That game looks amazing I would love to have a fantasy game that looks like that
I' assuming voxel engines will become extremely important/popular when VR systems come down in price and get more popular
Oooooo VR AND voxels?! That would be so cool
Why? What makes voxels good for vr?
@@Slash0mega That's a good question. I think it would be good for VR because it could further immerse you into a different reality. I mean you could be walking on sand, and your steps would leave behind footprints because you displaced the loose voxels. Maybe you could actually reach down and pick up a handful of those voxels. Let's say you're playing Boneworks and instead of stabbing a Null Body, you want to slice them. In the current state of the game, your slice would print a few wound circles over its skin and spawn a couple bleed effects (and apply damage a couple times). But if that Null Body was made of voxels, you'd be able to pierce its layers and tear away voxels as you drag your slice. And maybe even instead of bleed effects, there would be an actual stream of small voxels flowing from its body, just like the fluid in John Lin's voxel project. You could remove limbs and really anything from that organism. And not every voxel has to behave the same way. As we've seen with Teardown, voxels can bond with each other. Objects can be made of voxels and still be flexible, only snapping into pieces at a certain point. Or they can be difficult to pierce, like a brick wall. Or soft and easy to tear, like foam. Voxels are kind of like atoms but bigger. If they were in VR, it would really be like everything is made of big atoms. There would be so much more you could do in a virtual world because of that (most of the time, I think). I suppose that, in a sense, this as an addition or potentially even a norm for VR games, would be a step further into *ultimate, sexy, gamer* _immersion._ Like if John Lin's voxel project was an actual VR game, imagine how cool that would be. EVERYTHING would be interactable. I mean we do have Minecraft in VR, but that's different. The blocks aren't necessarily voxels and they are GIMONGOUS. They also don't bond with each other and not all blocks have physics (And the ones that do only really follow gravity and not much more than that). Anyways that's all thanks for reading 🐙
@@thederpderp7758 No tl;dr? I read a bit and I don't think there's such things like "loose voxel". Remember, it's a rendering technique, not actual atoms. I don't know much myself. But an advantage I could think off is when the player clips into an object (like a stone). Now, if they do that, they'll see its empty inside. But perhaps voxels can change this. Don't quote me, I don't know much myself.
Edit: my bad. It's not a rendering technique.
@@Slash0mega The main selling point of VR is its ability to immerse people in interactable truly 3d environments. Voxels are good at, well, creating interactable 3d environments.
Like the video mentions, obviously, you can create 3d games with 2d triangle meshes but those objects will generally lack "volume" without a lot of effort and computing power, and "volume" of objects is needed so that the game world feels complete, and make interactions feel more natural/realistic.
the singular reason i prefer voxels: less "rigid" and more flexible and interactive enviroments
@@ezekielrauch3703 Sorry to tell you that those are simple words even for me, and english is not my native language.
@@m.dave2141 what? Rururhrhejskekfi5ib6obyob5ov3yoneoybqoybotqnoyehowtgo35ho3yh.
@@m.dave2141 I think he means that they're basically buzzwords without substance, like which game isn't "interactive" and "flexible"
I've always loved pixel art and has been keeping an eye on voxels for a while. Might actually start using them as theyre neat as hell.
Just found your channel because of your dead matter video and I thought I was just gonna watch that one video and be done with it. However, I have just watched a few more of your videos and I can't help but notice you're something special lol. I know this sounds cringe but CZcamsrs have to "earn" my subscription and I know many others share the same value as I do. It usually takes weeks if not months of youtube recommending me a CZcamsrs videos for me to subscribe. In this case, it took less than 1 hour of watching your videos for me to subscribe. There is something so authentic, rustic, raw about your videos that I haven't experienced since the old Minecraft lets play videos I watched as a child. You're funny, interesting, and different and I would just like to say thank you for letting me feel something I haven't felt in a while, you have more than earned my subscription. Keep it up and please don't stop being you :).
As you can see I haven't uploaded in a while because sometimes it's hard to find motivation to create, especially when most of my audience that came here from the dead matter video ignores everything else I post. But this is one of the nicest comments I've gotten in a while, and it helped to reignite the spark a little :) I'm working on a Skyrim video, have just the editing left but I can't say when I'll get around to finishing it, I just hope you tune in to check it out :) I do get discouraged at times but I never think about quitting, I'll definitely be around for a while
@@chromerot I will definitely be here for any new videos that come out. Can't wait to see what the skyrim video has in store for us :).
@@chromerot You really should keep going, you are going to blow up.
I just got you randomly in my recommended and expected you to have hundreds of thousands subscribers but u only have 20k.
Keep it up bro!
1:13 finally! A way to make triangles, with triangles!!
triangulated triangles ftw!
Another great voxel game is Clone Drone in the Danger Zone. It recently just did a full release of its main story, and is out of early access.
It has very fun combat, where health is location based instead of health bar based. So even armored enemies can be taken down with a single well placed hit, but so can you.
You're confusing boxel games with voxels, they are used in many games and are usually redered smooth so people that think only Minecraft is "voxels" miss the point. Minecraft is to voxels as Atari graphics are to hi fidelity pixel art, very limited, lacks detail, and the rendering doesn't make use of many features that can make the graphics nicer and smoother. The greatest irony is that one of the advantages of voxels is that you can represent smooth terrain with it, which is something you cannot do with polygons as internal representation. Sure you need to render them as polygons often but with voxels you could zoom in and regenerate the polygons as you move and never see jagged edges, that's just how the voxel scalar field can be rendered. Even Roblox has smooth rendering of voxel terrain these days. Not even talking about AAA titles like No Man's Sky, Subnautica and many others.
@@trinidad17 I understand the difference, im just referring to the artstyle. I feel Minecraft takes it too far in the blocky direction to truly be considered voxel art style anyways. Its more or less its own thing.
Part of the charm of voxel games is that they have a 3D pixel look to them. Sure, lots of games can use voxels for complex procedural generation, and smooth it out afterwards. But im talking about games that have that iconic mid-detail blocky look. Not exactly the practicality of it.
My oh-oh-ah-ah brain understood this. Thank you.
So we not gonna talk about how 2:31 hit the peak of the most replayed bar? I wonder why...
very strange indeed...
Correction: Rendering voxels does not require CPU, they can and must(!) be rendered on GPU. Telling you as a render-programmer.
Another one, it's just wrong to say, that rendering multiple straight lines simpler for the computer than one curve line. e.g. parabola is just x^2, what is difficult there?
On the other hand, the 3d curve surface is indeed more difficult to render, because it requires light-transport simulation techniques to project on the screen.
I'm pretty sure multiple straight lines to make up the parabola is still much simpler. I don't know how you would even make a parabola without using many straight lines. Just doing x^2 will give you a bunch of discrete points. Anything part of the curve that has a slope steeper than a 45 degree angle will have it's points not be connected, so you need to use lines to connect them.
6:19 I like to imagine that in a few decades, a computer (or console) will be powerful enough to render voxels at a level that competes with current day computers handling polygons.
Really sad there's been no update on John's game
once voxels reach to a point where it's becomes "HD" or smaller, it'll create an illusion of a more refined 3d object, that it'll be harder to tell what's a voxel and polygon.
The voxel game looks totally like something that you could feed to some AI to "upscale" it to some good looking video.
or have 3d cards render an equivalent surface for the voxels that's much more polished but still voxels underneath. A hybrid voxel/polygon environment where voxels could be quantized into a surface plane if they're close enough-- with an ability to select how close of a threshold to snap them into that quantization. Like a level-of-detail slider that would be almost entirely 1990s polygons at one end, and purely voxels at the other.
ReAl wOrLd SiMuLaTioN
Jokes aside, you explained this very well! I would describe it as pixel art but in 3D ^^
Can’t wait for John’s game :)
yep, that's pretty much what it is :) thanks for watching
Honestly, I feel like we're in the early stages of voxel gaming. I could see voxel games becoming extremely complicated 10 to 20 years from now to the point that the individual voxel particles are completely blended into the world and unnoticeable. Right now, it feels like what early 8bit is to what video games are now, or in terms of growth it will be like early 3D gaming to what its become.
Something worth adding: The two work hand in hand. Voxels and triangles I mean. Voxels are the shape, triangles are the means by which the GPU sorts and displays it. Each square face has two triangles, a cube can have 6 faces at most (intersections and backfaces are culled) so a voxel is 12 triangles or an even number under that. I too wish there was a better way for graphics cards to know how to handle this more optimally, but as long as it's efficient I can't say that I mind the final translation still being done in triangles.
the kiss at the end though :p
Open mouth kisses on the teeth bro.
voxels, you say?
I looooooove the look of voxels. Such a charm to their graphics. Outcast is one of my favourite games and i think it looks so artistic!
People use voxels nowadays mostly in robotic research because voxels are closer to real-world representation than triangles and it makes results for robotic applications more accurate
I am excited for the voxel revolution! In a way it's almost evolving from like 8-bit to 16-bit resolution, and so it's many generations behind graphics wise because of it's more intense resource requirements for all that data. BUT, I'm picturing how it will look in about 5 years and I have very high hopes for those voxels to keep getting smaller and smaller.
There are already games where the voxels don't look like huge awful pixels, although that can be a stylistic choice. But for example, Subnautica's terrain is voxel based. Rendering them as big square blocks is like upscaling an image using nearest neighbor, instead of bicubic interpolation, but people like it that way I guess.
This is what I have always wanted to see in a video game. When I saw the graphics I instantly thought they were awesome, because they reminded me of atoms [not that I know much about them but yk what I mean]. I love voxels, hopefully we will see more of this.
I think this is amazing, know this from some fields of engineering, they are working with voxels, as an example for 3d printing where the goal is to be able to add material continuously on the level of voxels (some are already able to do this), but voxels are really huge in industry chances are high this will effect game development, they are also used for fluid simulations, smoke fire and so on... But a benefit of polygons is with a very low triangle count you can achieve a very smooth looking surface, voxels need to be very very small to look good unless you want to have the look of minecraft...
I can't get over how beautiful that demo/game looks
Informative walk-thru, appreciate it. I was surprised you didn't mention 7 Days To Die. They've been bumping up the voxel-based format for a while now, and their next version of the game is coming out soon.
Following John Lin now too and going to start seeing what he's putting together. Thanks guys!
Damn this video feels like you have a million subs, keep at it you're awesome bro
you're awesome for watching
you can convert voxels to polygons... so you keep the voxel style and the performance of triangles
i love how you never assume that the viewer Doesn’t know about whats being talked about but you still explain it anyway. never assuming the intelligence of your audience while still making the subject clear for those who Are unaware without making them feel stupid. great video!
unique compliment, thank you :)
let's make a petition for Nvidia to add voxel rendering capabilities to
their Quadro GPU line up!
Interesting! Im not a geek at all when it comes to game creation. Had no clue what voxels were before this vid.
Did somebody say geek?!
Same here.
I just like the look of voxels. Like, when its something like teardown. Idk just stylistically looks dope to me :3
Where is he? He could atleast tell us if he's still working on it or not, but 2 whole years without a single update!?
That just sad!
Please continue making videos like this. Your editing and narration is very entertaining and informative :)
comments like this encourage me to keep making videos, i really hope you check out my other stuff and stick around
I just love this kind of aesthetic. ''3D pixels'' is something that I've really liked for a long time, and now I have a name for it. I wonder if this look can be accomplished without resorting to voxels. It seems that these games are more for exploring and shaping the environment, but can other themes be possible too?
One correction that I'd like to make is that Voxels actually do perform really well. Depending on the specific implementation, they might perform even better than Polygons. The issue with them is with animation. We don't know any efficient way of handling animation in a voxel environment. Right now, the most efficient method of voxel animation is the Marching Cubes algorithm. But that doesn't handle deformation well, unless the resolution is absurdly high.
Leaving the comment, hoping that GPU vendors are getting interested :)
There's a fine line of making a video, between making it professional to making it look like a shitpost...
This man breakdanced on that line. The video was well made and entertaining. You, sir, deserve a medal.
LMAO
This needs to be used in an RPG setting.
Imagine being a wizard and shit and moving cubes about!
I'm feeling more tiny then his voxel size, because I attempted this while learning game engines.
The amount of Optimization techniques that must be implemented or discovered to rendering so many instances is hard to imagine.
The idea of this much Density of Voxel is beyond my thinking capability.
Thanks for bringing this out of YT dump shadows.
What if the type of dynamic rendering from unreal engine could be applied to voiceless, such that one voxel could divide into 8 when viewed closer.
Someone smarter than me could probably figure it out. The challenge is that voxels (unlike triangles) create a one-to-one relationship between screen geometry and scene geometry. There is no layer of abstraction (or at least, one is not required).
I would think that tesselation or noise algorithms could produce sub-voxels easily enough, but now every other voxel must ALSO be sub-divided (killing performance) or every voxel now needs a subdivision index of some kind and the data structure gets incredibly complex.
It's possible that some clever pointer magic and index buffers could solve this though. I'd sure love to see an attempt.
Yoooooo that's a dope idea. Maybe that could actually work, depending on if any experienced enough individuals pursue that idea!
Totally see an avatar game made in voxel engine, it would be perfect!
I think something important to consider in voxel games is what, exactly can be destroyed and how. Any sandbox game with buildable and destructable terrain faces this issue, and with voxels, it's even more important. take the stone walls we saw around 7:24, for example. With a cobblestone wall like that, it's made of a bunch of materials, but if you can just carve through it with ease, it might as well be a single material with a texture. Different materials like dirt, stone, mortar, and glass would need different hardnesses and breaking properties, or else the world might as well be entirely made of spray-painted cheese.
Don't forget Noita, where "every pixel is simulated". It's 2D game though, but would have made a great example for this video.
I feel like the voxel will be way better, cos it's physics and actual representation of the world is better
Triangles are why wheels in car games arent smooth.
not sure if this is a joke, wheels are not smooth in real life nor would the looks actually matter for the physics
I really liked the idea of voxels when I first heard of them in the 90's.
I'd really like to see more games using this intriguing technology.
that goodbye kiss in the end had me pressing the subscribe button
“Here we see tiny cubes”
CZcams: Minecraft, correct.
this is so much more advanced and harder to do than just polygons. Takes a lot of planning and optimizations. But eventually everything is rendered as triangles, this is just logically stored and processed as voxels
One of my favorite most recent voxel games is Valheim. I hope future developers decide to use voxels in their games. After all, we as humans worship The Cube.
I was waiting for this comment! As soon as I see anything like this rough voxel texture I think of Valheim ♡ Would love to see more games with design choices to use voxels in the future
@@homunculiar Haha! So glad someone else shares the same opinion! ☺️
I love voxels. I personally think lay of the land is a strong contender for a Minecraft killer, but I think something like this would make for an amazing spiritual successor to Worms 3D, a turn based artillery game with destructive environments.
This game looks gorgeous. Might not be the "can't tell what's real and what's not" quality of art from modern engines. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its own charm. Putting it side by side with minecraft, it looks AMAZING.
I LOVE John Lin's stuff. I've been watching it since as long as I knew it existed
Never knew Outcast used voxels. No wonder it looked so unique compared to other 3D games of the time.
If you render voxels with meshes they are still voxels. If your game objects are defined not only on a surface level but the have internal spatiality they are voxels-based. The voxel is about spatial information, not about rendering. So, if you use meshes to render voxels they are voxels, if you skip triangles/vertex shading and render your voxels by only using fragment shader they are voxels, if you use raytracing they still are voxels. Some people without expertise are talking about voxels considering render pipeline only and it's stupid.
03:31
the part where you say "sceintific dissertation thaht my WUAHAHAHA BRAIN can understand" had me laughing way to hard man hahhaha xD
OKAY AND- Voxels are just BEAUTIFULLL ❤️
I wish I could find an engine like Lin's, or at least the tools to make one like it. There's so much cool potential that I so much want to explore and make a game of my own in.
you could take a look at voxatron
Then make one yourself
@@thechadnesss5197 I'd love to, but I hardly know where to even begin! I've tried in the past and I usually end up with incredibly poor performance to the point of unplayability. I haven't had a lot of time in my life, especially since I made that post since I'm working a full time job and paying heavy rent for a crappy trailer with a few friends ^^;
@@mattomanx77 I recommend looking into sparse voxel DAGs. They can compress 100,000^3+ (one quadrillion voxels) in under a gigabyte and render them in real-time without even the most micro-tuned engine. The concept is actually extremely simple: it's a voxel octree that has been compressed to eliminate redundancies by storing pointers of which multiple pointers can point to a single shared node (like the type of structural sharing you find in persistent data structures in functional programming languages).
As a simple example, consider a binary tree that stores a node, N1, with "Foo" for left child and "Bar" for right child. Then somewhere else in the tree, another node, N2, stores the identical children. The sparse voxel DAG basically takes this case and avoids allocating that second node in memory by just making the parents of what would be N1 and N2 point to a single shared node, N1, using data structures like hash tables to find identical nodes in memory.
The other thing is that I recommend using raytracing instead of rasterization for voxels. I can actually raytrace a quadrillion voxel SVDAG in real-time on the CPU faster than I can rasterize the resulting voxel's faces on the GPU (even with frustum culling and hierarchical Z-buffering). You don't have to use RTX to raytrace voxels super fast using a sparse voxel DAG. Voxels lend themselves especially well to raytracing.
I'm almost back man! The exam will be over at Jan 29, hopefully can binge-watch your vids then.. I did watch a few in the meantime and noticed that there haven't been any new vid.. Good luck with your work man!
youtube compression is much nicer to the voxels than the unreal example
This is why building in minecraft is so satisfying. Me who is a minecraft builder can confirm tak voxels are one of the best things to work with. Both in games or other softwares!
"Today most games use polygons"
Teardown: are you sure about *that*
me: yes im sure
Teardown uses polygons. Voxel engines use polygons to make the cubes, but Teardown isn't even a true voxel engine IMO: freely moving objects' voxels don't conform to the grid
I do web development for a living. You absolutely just inspired me to go into this type of stuff. Hitting the library learning the math as we speak. Thank you so much for being an inspiration.
hey maybe I'll cover your game on the channel in a few years ;)
This was a really good video. You’ve got a talent for sharing information in an entertaining and digestible way.
I love that he answers the question in the thumbnail. Voxels are tiny cubes or better put pixels but 3d
I love how some tricks to make games more optimised is to remove object permeance, if you cant see it it don't exist until you can again.
Frustum and Occlusion culling
Minecraft is probably the best example of giant chunky voxels. Its why the worlds can be so huge without lag.
I remember Mark playing Teardown and falling absolutely head over heels with that one tree. I don't blame him at all lmao. Voxels may be harder to manage in terms of development but they're weirdly gorgeous to look at.
The game Vangers used voxels for terrain, it's from 1998 but you could see the trails the cars made in the ground and stuff
Voxel: a unit that turns every game into Minecraft
Somehow you achieved a feeling of excitement in me that I did not have for years. Thank you for that.
love to hear that, thank you for watching! :)
The crazy thing with the part about the screen rendering being an illusion, the image your eye receives of light in the real world is the same application.
EVENTUALLY, one day, a decade or more from now, all games will have Super Mega RTX and Voxels so tiny you won't be able to notice they're there. And it will be beautiful.
There are actually ways to blend voxels and triangles together. Most known breakthrough is the new voxel engine\plugin for Unreal. It uses voxels for building realistic physically accurate terrains. It was in development long before UE5, but Lumen and Nanite allow to use it at full potential.
here's a good examle of such blend: czcams.com/video/6xLxtlWoZkw/video.html
Ecstatica 2, Little Big Adventure, Outcast... the voxel era was a truly beautiful time for games.
3:30 you got me there
I think the best way to approach voxels is to use them to store world data, and then overlay polygons on the outside for rendering (unless you specifically want the cubic voxelized look, which is totally fine). You mentioned Minecraft in the video, but another great example of this is Astroneer, which has similar dynamic terraforming like John Lins demos, but with an overlay of polygons to hide the cubes that make it up. Doing this you can effectively get the utility of voxels while still being able to take advantage of all the fancy polygon rendering tricks we know and love.
I would kill to have an rpg in this guys voxel style, it looks so immersive and stylized, I totally dig it.
i think it would be very cool for shooter games if somehow its rendering becomes more efficient over time and voxels can become smaller
A hybrid approach is IMO the smartest way to take advantage of both voxel and polygon technology. Store the entire map, level, whatever in voxel format, but render the voxel structure as a polygon mesh. When the environment isn't being affected, render the polys. As soon as you start interacting with the environment in a destructible nature, render that part in voxels. As soon as the destructive action is over, rebuilt the voxel structure with polys, and render it as polys until another destructive action is taken.
They whole talk of triangles forming curves, paired with that lovely example, made me think of that one SnapCube bit about Rogue and her polygons
I would soooo buy that game
the thing is, it can technically be very detailed and not require much power, like if you had a game with lots of small details and one with only big details but they run at 4k, you'll need the same computing power.. with polygons more details will mean more computing power. So perhaps detail in a game could potentially be easier to run with voxel if it gets developed further (also on as in new hardware to support better quality voxel games)
First video of yours I’ve watched. Love it. Instant sub bro
Dude that game that John Lin is making is fricken beautiful