Dear Future Gamer

Crikey! I now know that I know nothing about voxel processing (FG37), whereas before I was in blissful ignorance of its existence. I assume it's a good thing and I'm happy for anyone who understood all that. Perhaps we can have a translation in next week's Future Gamer? I assume it means that 3D images can be easily processed by your CPU, using some sort of compromise type thingy to save memory and time out for calculations.

Questions: does this look as good as/move as fast as accelerated 3dfx? Also, does it scale, mip map interpolate, rotate and so on in a manner indistinguishable from/similar to 3dfx? Does it glitch like the PlayStation? Will games using it still benefit from hardware acceleration? Will these mystical objects polygon clip? What's the collision detection like? Can it do the bells and whistles like smoke and transparencies? In a nutshell, is it any good? The lack of opinions on these matters suggest you've just copied and pasted a University of Iowa press release and understand it little better than I do. Sorry you guys, but not enough useful information was given - we gamers are a simple lot.

Michael Foster

FG: Our little Language Of Videogames isn't supposed to be in-depth, Michael, it's supposed to explain words and phrases that we gamers hear all the time but which we don't perhaps fully understand. I admit the voxel processing explanation was terribly technical, but that's kind of the reason we ran it. We couldn't understand it either. In a nutshell, voxel processing is a method of producing 3D environments without the need for 3D accelerator cards and yes, when it's done well it can be most excellent. Novalogic's Delta Force is a fine example of a game that uses voxel processing.