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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

Okay I played Veloren for a bit a few years ago and I'm really impressed with the improvement, will need to give it another go.

One serious question I have, is there a reason with voxels we still need to have block based stuff? Like back when voxel tech first started taking off I kind of thought we'd get to the place where like you have so many voxels and we get so good at calcing the physics interactions it would just look like a normal game.

What are the bottlenecks there? Or is this intentionally stylistic still these days?

From looking at some of the bosses I can tell that's getting closer but we're still further than I'd think

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It appears to be stylistic?

When I see a voxel rotating in space ... that's not really a "voxel" in my mind, it's a cube.

I suppose we over-apply the word though these days.

Fair, I guess something like the finals is what Im thinking of? Im not sure though I think they may pre bake their destructible terrain

The Finals destruction is not prebaked. The reason it works and is consistent is because everything is done server side and communicated to all clients. The game is very CPU heavy for this reason.

That's very good to know, I thought it seemed a bit too complex to be, but I wasn't sure.

I'm kinda there with you. The first game I ever played that used Voxels extensively was Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. All the 2nd gen Westwood games of that era used voxels for their units and projectiles, and nothing about the art style was intended to be heavily cubist like Minecraft popularized. Ultimately I think we built around technology that modeled physics differently, both in hardware and software.

Check Space Engineers 2 and Enshrouded. They push voxels in that direction. Similarly, SE2’s watersim on planets will be incredible as well.

There are a lot of voxel games that aren't visually cubey. Marching cubes algorithm is just example. Here's a voxel game (fully deformable/mineable world) that isn't block based https://store.steampowered.com/app/1203620/Enshrouded/.

Oh man how could I forget about Enshrouded, that's a really good example, thank you for bringing that up.

Okay so it does just seem stylistic at this point then.

It's a bit odd, because the main appeal of blocky voxels is that it makes building easier, and these aren't building games.

Have you seen the game Teardown?

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