Voxelcount? New trends in gaming and real-time raytracing

Zephir62

Jon and his team have created a very fast, true voxel engine with ray-tracing from the ground up.

Full Article: http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/8959/Garrett-Fuller-Whats-Next-for-Mark-Kern.html

Their website with teaser video: http://www.mek-entertainment.com/



Another raytraced voxel engine is called 'Staxel', from a couple employees who left Chucklefish Games / Starbound. You can see more here : http://playstaxel.com/

What is occuring? It appears a new rendering format, Raytracing, is becoming increasingly plausible in realtime gaming. Voxels appear to be the stepping stone until we perhaps evolve to raytraced triangles, just as pixel art was to 80's and 90's gaming and here we are today.



Thoughts, my Polycounting friends?

Chimp

-grumpy gsep was grumpy-

Anchang-Style

Are you sure those links about Mark Kern are correct? They don't say anything about Voxels? or am i wrong?

iniside

Looking at that:
http://playstaxel.com/

Of course they can use voxels. Entire game looks to be made out of voxels. There is alot of horse power left to render it, since you don't have to perform voxelization (your scene is already from voxels), you don't have to store voxel representation of scene (for the same reason), and you don't need to merge voxel lighting results back to polygons, since you don't have them.

This example is far cry, from what the voxel tracing is intended to be used, which is rendering realistic, dynamic, real-time scenes.