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Re:Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust by colordrops on Sunday March 13, 2022 @10:30PM (#30667936)
Guessing here, but perhaps the computational complexity for rendering voxel assets is much more bounded, e.g. you can't make something with a super dense vertex count and complex shaders and other transforms and bog the game engine down.
Re:Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust by zesterer on Monday March 14, 2022 @06:05AM (#30670483)
Actually, completely the opposite is true. There's a reason that voxel games appeared after games with more traditional meshes.

The fundamental complexity of voxel data structures is higher: O(n^3) for iteration, and the density of polygons required after meshing is generally much higher. The only real benefit from a complexity standpoint is that storage and access of specific voxels is much faster, but this often doesn't represent a payoff.

Voxels are great for a lot of things, but making a game like Veloren run quickly is much harder than you might initially realise. There's a reason that we're told at least every 3 years that a new company has come up with the 'engine of the future' using voxel tech only to have it vanish into obscurity as they try to turn it into something that's not a tech demo.

For Veloren, there is a big benefit: we get to create enormous procedural worlds. But actually controlling the complexity of that data and efficiently storing/accessing it is a non-trivial change as you'll see from the project's dev blog.

Re:Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust by jayd16 on Monday March 14, 2022 @12:18PM (#30674289)
>and the density of polygons required after meshing is generally much higher.

That seems a bit misleading. With uniform voxels the occlusion culling becomes much easier and you only render surface polygons.

On the other side you don't get hand made imposters so rendering far away mountains and such becomes a challenge. You dont want to render every voxel of a distant object if a voxel is smaller than a pixel.