[badmonkey0001]

That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs.

They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using low-poly collision models (with the same pitfalls such as moonwalking, blocked projectiles or mystery-bouncing).

[albertzeyer]

What about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y&feature=relat...

[badmonkey0001]

Sorry for the belated reply. Yeah, I saw Atommontage and it's quite interesting. Despite the realism of the track marks left and suspension movement, the truck still seems to exhibit some unnatural "floating" feeling. These are the very pitfalls of dealing with lower-res poly collision that I was speaking about. Kind of an uncanny barrier for movement.

I do feel that this author is a bit further along at something ship-able than the Euclideon folks are though.

[wtracy]

As far as I can tell, they're not doing any voxel-voxel collisions. Mesh-voxel collisions sound much more tractable.

[tintin]

Yeah I think so. A tree-lookup can make things easier, but then you have to estimate the bounce direction.

But overall it's a great demo. And you see more and more games using voxels for surroundings. So ofcourse you could combine this technique with polys.

[badmonkey0001]

The more I think about it, the more I realize that of the three pure voxel problems (rendering, animation and collision), rendering is probably the low-hanging fruit - Though I'm not sure if creating a hybrid poly/voxel engine is any harder or easier.

Here's to at least getting a hyper-real Myst someday :)

[onemoreact]

Collision need not be at the same resolution as the rendering which should help. But animation is probably limited by how much of the scean changes. If it's a small percentage of the enviornment removing the old objects and adding the new ones should be reasonably fast. Or if it's a small number of objects you could always keep them in a seperate tree and translate a ray in the main scean with one for the moving object.