has anyone noticed the huge flood of voxel based indie games? it seems that most of these are just trying to ride on the success of minecraft.
but it has led me to wonder something, why do you think there are no triple A titles that a voxel based( none that i see anyway ). and why do you think so many indie titles go for this route? are the easier to make? to try and cash in?
It's easier to implement boxes. Really hate seeing comments on games that use blocks that say it's a minecraft rip off when the gameplay is completely different (not even first person) as if minecraft invented the box. I guess how Apple is trying to stop other phone companies from using rectangles with rounded edges, people can't tell the difference.
Minecraft is, in itself, a ripoff of other games. it was no where near the first voxel based game, and its really not that great imo. it was just in the right place at the right time.
there are some games like cube world which is influenced by mcs aesthetics.
then there are some voxel top down shooters.
but there are so many voxel games where they take everything about minecraft and just tack on one more element
Yeah, Minecraft is a ripoff of a few games like you said.
wikipedia wrote:
The developer of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, began developing the game as an independent project while working for King.com and later jAlbum. He was inspired to create Minecraft by several other games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper, and later Infiniminer. At the time, he had visualized an isometric 3D building game that would be a cross between his inspirations and had made some early prototypes. Infiniminer heavily influenced the style of gameplay, including the first-person aspect of the game, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements.
nevertheless, minecraft wasnt really what i was intending this topic to be about
i was more curious what you think on why a large amount of indies choose to go the voxel route and why major releases havent bothered even with its increase in popularity
i was more curious what you think on why a large amount of indies choose to go the voxel route and why major releases havent bothered even with its increase in popularity
Same reason zombie games and movies took off in recent years, just popularity in large groups. Voxel games in the indie market because Minecraft is the most popular game in recent times so people are imitating it. If Super Meat Boy was popular right now you would see in increase in games similar to it. Same reason you suddenly had Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Dead Rising, Dead Island, and Zombie for COD multi-player. Games are normally made in a popular genre or idea to piggy back the fame into a fan base or profit.
Meat Boy was popular when it came out. During that time you saw an increase in puzzle games. Now MC is popular so now we see an increase in voxel games.
Anyone know any 3D game engines optimized for voxel rendering? I really like the art style of voxel games but it seems that as easy as cubes are to render so many engines are obsessed with polygons.
Engines dedicated to rendering Voxels are often more efficient than rendering voxels in engines dedicated to rendering polygons. Polygon engines require 12 triangles just to render a simple cube in some cases...
The word "voxel" is a portmanteau of "volumetric" and "pixel" (which in turn is a portmanteau of "picture" and "element"). Essentially a three-dimensional cube, they are used to build objects in a virtual space, especially terrain.
A voxel (volumetric pixel or Volumetric Picture Element) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space.
Short for volume pixel, the smallest distinguishable box-shaped part of a three-dimensional image.
So yes, they have to be cubes. Unless a new definition of voxel has come to not mean cube. Though, I should point out that Minecraft isn't voxel.
Note that voxels can be infinitely small so that they no longer look like cubes (but they still are cubes). Using voxels doesn't mean you have to have a minecraft like game.
If i'm not mistaken, CoD Black Ops uses a voxel engine for it's graphics. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km0DpZUgvbg