Dear Future Gamer

The thing about voxels, (FG37) right? Is that they're a bit like pixels. But, wheras pixels are 2D, voxels are 3D. It's dead simple. The industry has been using them since at least Christmas 1992, with Comanche Maximum Overkill by Novalogic.

To answer Michael Foster's questions: Voxels do scale and rotate, but they don't mipmap because there are no textures on voxels, because apparent textures are created from the voxels themselves. Whether or not they are interpolated (that's having their edges smoothed, folks) depends on how you're doing them - they don't in any of the voxel games I've seen. And no, they don't look as good as 3dfx - as far as I've seen.

They don't clip because they're nice and solid, there are no polygons involved at all (since voxels are an alternative to polygons). That solidity would make collision detection nice and easy (like it was with pixels in 2D). Smoke and transparenies? In theory, yes, since voxels should be able to do anything that pixels can. In practice, I've never seen it.

So there we go. Voxels were on the cards since before the days of 3D accelerators, but they were largely rejected because polygons look better, and are more efficient. Magic Carpet looked better than Comanche, for example.

Alistair Baxter

FG: I hope that's put Michael and everyone else straight about the difference between voxels and pixels. I don't know how I managed before I knew all this...