The Perfect Voxel Engine

But I have sympathies for the author here. It’s sometimes really hard to verbalize conceptual ideas. You “feel” them, but any explanation sounds trivial. It’s likely there’s a bit more to it than your summary suggests.

Not sure what the author could have done better, I struggle with this myself.

It has destructible scenes, physics and even some gameplay. Much smaller & simpler scenes and not as good looking though. But pretty good for a 15 years old project!

Edit: found it—“voxel game StoneQuest microgeometry” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXm5JWys55o

Now those are voxels I can get behind. Also vaguely think I've heard the name semi-recently.

If voxels just mean the smallest rendering primitive is a cube instead of a triangle then I agree it seems just like an artistic preference.

Minecraft has "voxels" (they are rendered as polygons) that are 1 meter square in size. More granularity would add a lot to the games. There are even mods that try to add a more granular kind of voxel to the game, like "chisels & bits". That one specifically is very popular and used in most modpacks, so that might be a hint for a successful voxel game in the future.

Why the appeal now? Voxels are a simpler model for describing the world and adding granular detail, at least at first sight. Ultimately you still have to model bending, physics, animation, free rotation, etc. which is AFAIK more complicated than for polygon based 3D data. Essentially a voxel object still needs to have a secondary parametric representation to describe things like elasticity or connectivity, etc. (not sure how it's done), though I assume the techniques are not too far off from skeletal animation etc. in traditional engines (which also use such a simpler representation overlayed on / inside the mesh.

But I think that leads to the second appeal: Trying to squeeze out a few more polygons per second or a specific little effect on the fundamental technique level in traditional 3D engines is pretty hard but only gives you so much in return. I can understand how something you can approach with a fresh set of eyes, with fewer established working solutions, is appealing in itself. There's (seemingly) more to discover, more to invent.

2) The finite limitations "leave more to the imagination" - in the same way that low resolution pixel art might, vs a high resolution vector image.

3) A very minor factor, but worth noting: not only are voxels visually novel, but they are technologically novel - in order to make a competitive voxel engine, you typically are not using an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity (though you can, and there are many voxel pluggins for these engines). Thus programmers are drawn to them (IMO) - they are an easy way to visually show off your technical know-how, just as you might many other effects in the demo scene.

4) A false sense of nostalgia - voxel engines never were very widespread, and the closest thing in the early days tended to be height-map driven rather than volumetric (the earliest notable exception being Voxlap). But the "nostalgia" exists, just as it does with synthwave (most of which does not fully mirror any music of the 80s/90s).

5) Voxels are point-based volumetric representation and thus are much easier to use for procedural generation (vs describing a surface, which is much harder). Though voxels are often wrapped on the surface with polygons, this is trivial (vs, say, describing the polygonization of a metaball without using voxels).

They're good for giving mass to objects instead of just having a shape. Thus far that's mostly meant they're used for terrain which is destroyable.

The game did have some fun aspects to it, especially the zombie mode (every game needed a zombie mode for some reason). Bad management and bad technical choices destroyed the game. For example a mobile version was developed, no idea why anyone would think that would work...