31–40 of 74 posts
Technically this is not related to voxels ("volumetric pixels", so to say), which split the 3D space equally along all three axes. This is just a height map, a set of prisms, not entirely unlike a Doom map. Every prism has a regular fixed-size square base. For 1992, this was mind-boggling though.
Off topic: The very first assignment in this game is called “oil tank holiday”: fly the chopper to unguarded oil tanks, shoot and watch them burn, and then fly home. No enemies. Just learn to fly and shoot. 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…
Is this the same algo used for Magic Carpet (1994)? The style looks very familiar, and I always wondered how they pulled it off. 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...
Technically this is not related to voxels ("volumetric pixels", so to say), which split the 3D space equally along all three axes. This is just a height map, a set of prisms, not entirely unlike a Doom map. Every prism has a regular fixed-size square base. For 1992, this was mind-boggling though.
This height map contains vertical elements 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.
This sure brings back memories. 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 t…
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.
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...
I tried to replicate the effect in Visual Basic, albeit with very limited success at the time.