Dear Future Gamer

I felt I should try to heal Michael Foster's headache about voxels (FG38). I haven't had a chance to study voxels in depth so tech-heads may find this overly simplistic, but then that's the point (programmers intentionally use scary words so no-one can understand them - it makes them feel powerful).

Firstly, they're not polygons so your 3D card won't accelerate them. They're pixels (the dots a 2D image is made of) with volume (which is the definition of 3D). So if you think of pixels as coloured square tiles arranged on the screen to make a 2D picture, voxels are coloured cubes arranged in virtual space to make 3D pictures.
Think of them as boxels...

They make absolutely gorgeous graphics and look more realistic than polygons. They can scale, rotate, light source and be transparent - all the best effects. Resolution is the thing holding them back though, as CPUs aren't powerful enough to do voxels in High-Res; this is why Outcast is locked at 400x300. When CPUs get fast enough to run a voxel engine at 800x600, it's likely that more people will start using them.

Michael Flaherty, Digital Images

FG: Thanks for that, Michael. I certainly didn't anticipate the chatter that voxels would provoke when we first ran the description of them in Language of Videogames, but now I reckon we're all clear on what they are, so no more explanations please.