Hacker News Reader

Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Attn. vaporware naysayers: Some smart people think this is worth pursuing. Miguel Cepero has been doing this forever with Voxel Farm. Sony almost made an Everquest with it. John Carmack once believed a future id engine would be voxel-based. It hasn't been proven yet with a big hit, but there is probably something here worth noting.

View on HN

I don't think most are saying "voxels aren't worth pursuing", only "every voxel implementation we've seen has been un-marketable because of major limitations they were misleadingly silent about, new ones inherit that doubt".

So Sparse Voxel Oct-trees (SVOs) have been around for a while now. NVIDIA heavily invested in researchers for this. However, the existing workflow for game / movie assets is polygonal in nature, making this a really niche technology. They've instead focused on Bounding Volume Hierarchies (bVOs) which allow for fast ray tracing into traditional models / with normal materials.

I don’t think voxel engines need to work with only voxels. The environment could be, but animated models should probably still be polygons.

So the challenge is you don’t just need fast voxel rendering, you need fast 3D rasterization into an optimized data structure (like sparse voxel octrees).

I don’t think this will pay off until game engines do absolutely massive amounts of physics and lighting simulation. But I think it’s inevitable. You’re already seeing indirect lighting engines using low resolution sparse voxel representations of the world.

But isn't your comment just a list of failed endeavors? I've seen them as well, which is why I am a vaporware naysayers - I think it be prudent from a Bayesian approach.

Why something failed matters. Was it a bad idea, or a good idea that was too far ahead of its time (and thus, a 'bad' idea in its time, but only pragmatically)?

Oh absolutely, I'm not saying the general technology is worthless.

Just that this implementation in particular, and a similarly advertised one in the past both stink of marketing bullshit with no actual substance behind it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com