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Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by bun_terminator on Saturday December 30, 2023 @06:34AM (#38814440)
I'm not a professional graphics programmer, but I dabble in it occasionally and hang out in GP communities. It's fascinating to see the wealth of voxel engines being written. Minecraft really had a massive cultural impact on the tech scene. Or maybe it's just that voxels are a particularly good target for various optimization techniques. Interesting either way!

For the author: Any particular reason you don't seem to be using DSA in your OpenGL code? ie glNamedBufferData() and friends. I found it the single thing that transforms OpenGL into something very user-friendly.

Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by phero_cnstrcts on Saturday December 30, 2023 @03:34PM (#38818826)
Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly engine based on marching cubes.
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by bun_terminator on Saturday December 30, 2023 @04:07PM (#38819157)
Minecraft is just polygons sure, but it has a "voxely" look, that's what I was getting at.
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by badpun on Saturday December 30, 2023 @04:19PM (#38819282)
If you want to use rasterization part of your GPU, you're going to have to eventually convert the voxel data into triangles.
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by paholg on Saturday December 30, 2023 @03:44PM (#38818921)
I think voxel has grown to have two meanings. One is as you describe, another is systems like Minecraft.
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by broast on Saturday December 30, 2023 @04:08PM (#38819158)
As an example, a more modern and higher resolution implementation of this style can be seen in "Teardown"
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by rzzzt on Saturday December 30, 2023 @05:28PM (#38819915)
I'm also thinking Novalogic games and Voxlap: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by paulddraper on Saturday December 30, 2023 @05:30PM (#38819935)
If you're familiar with pixels, you might be familiar with "pixel art", even though you every image on a screen has pixels
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by Jasper_ on Saturday December 30, 2023 @05:38PM (#38819993)
Huh? What about it uses marching cubes?
Re:High Performance Voxel Engine (2021) by SkeuomorphicBee on Saturday December 30, 2023 @08:06PM (#38820872)
Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.