Voxel Space
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For 1992, this was mind-boggling though.
> Such maps limit the terrain to “one height per position on the map” - Complex geometries such as buildings or trees are not possible to represent.
FWIW I'm working on a voxel sandcastle game. People usually seem particularly surprised by this style because they're so used to such games being rendered by height maps which don't allow tunnels or arches or overhangs.
In fact, an octree for this approach would be _meaningfully worse_ because finding "the topmost voxel" in each column is O(logn)—or maybe worse?—versus O(1) for a height map. With no benefits, because you never look at any other voxels.
No, it's not weird. The columns don't have gaps because they are columns represented by a height map, which can't display arbitrary voxel geometry (unlike octrees), but that doesn't mean they can't display voxel geometry at all.
> Which is to say, they're just columns...which is (definitionally) just a height map.
Yes. A height map is representing voxel data without overhangs.
> In fact, an octree for this approach would be _meaningfully worse_
That's irrelevant. The fact remains that rendering the same height data using an octree would look exactly the same. If the latter displays voxel geometry, the former does too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17171287
madmoose on May 28, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: How Voxels Became ‘The Next Big Thing’
Blade Runner didn't actually use voxels, they used a rather unique technique that they called "slice animations".
The 3D models were sliced from bottom to top into a couple of hundred slices (depending on desired quality) by intersecting the model with a horizontal plane and storing the resulting polygons.
The engine can only rotate the models around the vertical axis.
I made a hacky javascript version of the renderer a long time ago:
http://thomas.fach-pedersen.net/bladerunner/mccoy_anim_13_fr...
EDIT: Let me also plug our WIP Blade Runner engine for ScummVM:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/tree/master/engines/blade...
digi_owl on May 28, 2018 | prev [–]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_%281997_video_gam...
Seems that the people that developed the game considers it voxel based.
madmoose on May 28, 2018 | parent | next [–]
The page you linked quotes Louis Castle:
> What we are using is not voxels, but sort of 'voxels plus.'
So "not voxels". Louis Castle probably called it voxel-like because he didn't want to get too technical in an interview. Their technique has not been described in detail in the press but see http://deadendthrills.com/future-imperfect-the-lost-art-of-w... [Dead URL -- I tried to rewrite it with archive.org but it's down for me and apparently everyone else now -- can anyone else get through? -Don] for an article that calls it a "slice model"-technique.
I'm not an expert on voxels but I've reverse engineered and reimplemented most of the Blade Runner rendering engine and in my opinion it doesn't count as voxels. For one, you're never going to be able to rotate the models around any axis other than the vertical.
LouisCastle on May 28, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]
Fun! Yeah, we stored our data as slices for space and restricted rotation to the Y axis. Both were optimization since each frame of an animation was a full model there was no need to rotate them. The renderer could render them from any angle though so I still consider them voxels. More like voxels lite then voxel plus. We also used a lot of sprite cards with zdepth and a quick normal hack for lighting. You had to cut corners where you could back then!!
madmoose on May 28, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]
Hello Louis!
I've certainly had a lot of fun figuring out how you did what you did, so thank you for that, no matter what you call it :)
You certainly crammed a lot of tech into one engine! Full screen 15 BPP videos with full z-buffer with smaller alpha-channeled videos rendered on top, character models with lighting. Even the UI is looping videos.
Once I get proper path finding working Blade Runner will be a lot more playable in our ScummVM engine.
I've probably rewatched the opening scene of the game a thousand times while working on it...
I only wished that you had used a scripting language for your game code instead of compiling it to DLLs. I know you optimized heavily for speed but it would have made our task a lot easier :)
DonHopkins on May 28, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–]
So that's why you didn't include the Deckard -vs- Pris scene where she rotates around the X-axis! ;)
https://youtu.be/e9t5ikxjAQ4?t=1m9s
pjtr on May 28, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–]
Fun indeed!
Can you talk about how the artists authored the original models? Was it an automated conversion from a standard polygon model or from a full voxel model? Or was it all drawn in this special slice format directly somehow?
madmoose on May 28, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]
Not Louis, but the article I linked above says they used 3D Studio Max and converted it to the slice model format.
I tried to replicate the effect in Visual Basic, albeit with very limited success at the time.
https://github.com/ericoporto/i_rented_a_boat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_(video_game)
The voxel-style engines tend to feature a longer draw distance (due to it being cheaper to render, as you can easily use various hacks to eg. halve texture accesses far away).
For a detailed look into the rendering of Magic Carpet, start from Slide 8 of [2].
[1]: https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Magic_Carpet_(DOS)#1993 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180330004301/http://www.glennc...
I apply this in testing code. After you write some code, try to think of the absolute minimal test to prove that your code does anything at all without crashing. These are my “oil tank holiday” tests. It is always humbling to see those fail.
Wait why do they say painter's algorithm. Comanche and other such voxel terrain engines went front to back and never had overdraw.
Great for a helicopter game, Less so for general flight sim.
That was a large part of how games were designed back in the day. Start with what you have the ability to do, find the game that matches what you can do.
I remember figuring all this out as a self-taught teenager (pre-internet) with some books, a whole lot of time, and only a high-school level understanding of trigonometry. I built different versions - first in Pascal, then C, then Assembly.
Figuring out the algorithm was hard, but one of the optimizations I was most proud of was inventing (or so I thought) lookup tables to get around the slow floating point multiplication of my 16MHz 80286 CPU. I also remember "inventing" (ha!) the old bit shift + add technique.
There was something immensely satisfying about squeezing every last drop of performance out of a machine.
Nothing ever came of it. It was more or less a demo, but man did it make me feel like I accomplished something magical. I'd give anything to have a look at that source code today, but this post is the next best thing. So thanks for sharing. This made my day.
As a parent with kids in college, high school, and middle school, I lament (worry about?) how many obstacles youth now have reaching this dynamic. That thread of curiosity, discovery, struggle, and sense of accomplishment (or just learnings) is so profoundly formative. I’ve had mixed success creating space for it across my kids, but I sure miss the “pointless” threads I followed b/c of empty time when I was a kid.
I vaguely remember there was something about the VGA architecture of the day that made this approach much slower, but I might be misremembering. My recollection of it is fuzzy. I'm hoping someone will chime in to remind me what I might be thinking of.
It might also just have been that this approach didn't work well with my lookup table optimization (see my other post).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SplEU05z64
Using Deformations for Browsing Volumetric Data
1,367 views Jul 31, 2009: A prototype user interface for browsing volume data. Presented at IEEE VIS 2003 by Michael J. McGuffin, Liviu Tancau, and Ravin Balakrishnan. For more information, see
https://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/#mcguffin_vis2003
https://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/volumetricBrowsin...