[Deestan]

It's not correct to attribute the voxel game genre to Minecraft. It's just the first game of the genre to reach a considerable level of success.

Minecraft is just one of many games that were directly inspired by the underground hit Infiniminer.

[microtonal]

I fondly remember NovaLogic's Comanche series. While it isn't of the 'world building' genre, its voxel engine was very impressive for its time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_series

Also interesting (historically) is 'Rescue on Fractalus'. Not just for its cheesy name, but also due to its reliance on fractals to draw 3D mountain sceneries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus!

Edit: videos of both games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usj17cxSCKs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ-chrOgGg&feature=playe...

[Qz]

Rescue on Fractalus had one of the most genuinely terrifying game moments of my 'career'. I won't spoil it here, but you can probably guess what it was from the wikipedia page.

[microtonal]

Indeed! Spoiler alert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8opv5u9nf0

First time (as a kid) was shocking...

[Qz]

Actually the one I was talking about is when the pilot actually gets aboard the ship first!

[zer0her0]

I love NovaLogic's games and their voxel engine, don't they own several patents on voxel engine based games? I think I remember that coming up in a discussion a few years back on why we haven't seen more voxel games prior to this recent slew(besides hardware liking polygons more).

[andywood]

This recent slew aren't technically voxel games. At least not in the sense of NovaLogic's tech - see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447057.

(To add to the confusion, this particular game, Ace of Spades, actually is voxel-rendered.)

It is however thought that John Carmack's next engine after the Rage engine may include honest-to-goodness voxel rendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6

Historically, Carmack has had quite a lot of influence on both the hardware and API vendors, so it will be interesting to see if he can spearhead more mainstream movement towards sparse voxel octree rendering: http://youtu.be/THaam5mwIR8

[blhack]

Infiniminer may have been Notch's inspiration, but Minecraft is what created the genre. People making minecraft-like games right now aren't copying Infiniminer, they're copying minecraft.

The iPhone wasn't the first smart-phone, it wasn't even the first touch-screen smart phone, but most people (correctly) give it credit for popularizing the style, and creating a new "genre" for smartphones.

[PostOnce]

You are using the word created wrong. Infiniminer created the genre; Minecraft popularized the genre.

[ugh]

Why not? If it’s the one that made it popular then it’s the one that created the genre.

Edit: Well, ok, I don't want to put it in such absolute terms. But I do think that Minecraft deserves quite a large chunk of attribution for the genre.

[swombat]

Is Minecraft Voxel? I thought it was real (if blocky) 3D?

[andywood]

Calling Minecraft "voxel" is sure to introduce confusion. The representation of the map is simply a regular 3D grid of block IDs. When we use the exact same type of regular grid to represent 2D maps, we do not call the grid cells "pixels", so I don't think it's very informative to call these "voxels".

Minecraft is also not a voxel renderer. Voxel renderers typically work by casting rays against the grid. Minecraft draws the blocks with rasterized triangles, using a hardware-accelerated 3D API (LWJGL), just like almost every other 3D game.

In other words, there is practically no interesting overlap between what NovaLogic was doing, and what Minecraft does.

[Qz]

It's a 3D approximation of Voxels...