Hacker News Reader

Comment by mambodog | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in what can be done with voxels with a more realistic aesthetic, have a look at the Atomontage engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM

View on HN

Very excited to see what becomes of the Atomontage Engine. For years I've been annoyed with static 3D environments where walls don't actually crumble when shot at, and windows never shatter. This engine will change the way we react to realism in virtual environments.

Almost so much that it becomes easy to ponder if we're already in someone's 3D simulation ;)

Years and years ago (In the quake3 era) John Carmack talked about voxels being the future of 3d because of exactly thaty.

Ray-traced voxel based worlds. Personally, I think voxels will be hard to manage for objects/characters. Someone smarter than me will have to solve that problem.

Atomonontage still uses polygon-based rendering for some objects (the vehicle in that video is poly-based).

I believe the appropriate expression is 'Horses for courses'.

There are ways around such problems, especially in terms of bridging the gap between convex smooth surfaced solid objects and collections of cubes. As the technology gets more mature more sophisticated approaches will be fielded.

A classic way of solving the voxel vs. smooth object problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes

> Someone smarter than me will have to solve that problem.

Someone smarter, or someone with specific knowledge of the relevant domain and a lot more time to invest on the problem? I see a lot of people assuming that someone who can do something they can't is inherently smarter, even if they do something just as complicated for their daily job and think nothing of it.

Someone with more time on their hands. I've actually worked close to this subject area already. It can be solved, but I'd have to care more than I do to bone up on the material to tackle it.

Red Faction: Guerrilla and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 both have pretty decent destructible scenery.

RF:G only has destructible buildings/objects, however. The level geometry is still static.

The original Red Faction had largely destructible level geometry as well. However, that was just based on explosions deforming the terrain, rather than a physics simulation of destruction like RF:G. Polygons would fall if they were attached to nothing. The multiplayer level set in the natural canyon/bridge area is a good example of this: the large bridge in the second level (3 paths) is able to be taken out with some rockets and persistence to actually fall into the pit in the center. However, there was a limit to how much the level geometry could be deformed, and after a certain amount, explosions would stop removing sections from the terrain. It takes a good amount of time to get to this point, but it is possible. Also, the developers did a great job of hiding some interesting secrets in the deformable terrain. The multiplayer level with the two buildings on opposite sides and multiple levels with the desert in between has a hidden fusion rocket launcher (BFG, essentially) on the roof that's only accessible by destroying the terrain to get up there if my memory serves correctly. Also, the lobby level has four sections hidden behind walls, and a hidden roof area. Clearly, they put some work into using this feature well.

In Red Faction: Guerilla, only the buildings/objects are destructible, but there's more physics modeling. Taking out key supports will bring down buildings...in theory. I'm not a structural engineer, so I can't speak for its accuracy, but it often seems as if buildings are much hardier than they should be. Still, it's rather cathartic to take down an entire enemy barracks with a few explosives and a sledgehammer.

As for the actual math and methods behind this, I cannot say. I just know how it worked in gameplay from many hours playing the old RF multiplayer, and some recent time put into R:FG. Feel free to ask if you'd like to know more though.

(Huh, I never thought my videogame knowledge would be all that relevant here.)

There is nothing in the gaming future that excites me more than good old voxels. That game/engine looks amazing.

That's what minecraft should look like.

I've given it a lot of thought, and I don't think Minecraft would be so easy to pick up and play if in weren't so 'blocky'. At least not without some really good design. The size of the blocks in Minecraft really lend themselves to being able to put together things that approximate real life structures, while maintaining a sufficient level of simplicity.

This simplicity makes reasoning and manipulating the game world less challenging, resulting in the game being more accessible to a wide variety of players.

Similarly we don't give children atoms to play with, we give atoms constrained into lego blocks.

Constraints give rise to creativity. Just compare that to the "1K" or "7 day" competitions.

Or even compared to, for example, the constraints on plays in the Elizabethan era when Shakespeare wrote, or the syllabic constraints on haiku. One would think that there would be a bigger "dancing bear" (it's amazing that the bear dances at all, not that the bear dances well) factor, but not many playwrights match Shakespeare, given fewer (or no) constraints.

I've had to switch languages a lot when coding, but even in a constrained or flawed language, you see code that is beautiful and amazing. Constraints free up thought, as when you stop rebelling against a framework, you can excel in it. It's hard to push your brain into what feels like a hole; I can't get anything done in Perl because I spend too much time being repulsed, but some people embrace the language and produce great software.

Having just praised restrictions like that, though, I still have to mention that this game looks really cool.

This is probably why the old 8- and 16-bit games seem to have so much more compelling gameplay than ultra-realistic modern games. Well, that or we are just cranky oldtimers.

You don't wanna be in the Uncanny Valley - Minecraft is cute, because it's not real - hard from real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

A thought that crossed my mind some time ago is some consequences of fine-detail in Minecraft. You would be able to create objects of higher complexity packed into a manageable size. Would you pay money to someone who created a really useful (or cool) object in high-fidelity Minecraft?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com