[bun_terminator]

I'm not a professional graphics programmer, but I dabble in it occasionally and hang out in GP communities. It's fascinating to see the wealth of voxel engines being written. Minecraft really had a massive cultural impact on the tech scene. Or maybe it's just that voxels are a particularly good target for various optimization techniques. Interesting either way!

For the author: Any particular reason you don't seem to be using DSA in your OpenGL code? ie glNamedBufferData() and friends. I found it the single thing that transforms OpenGL into something very user-friendly.

[phero_cnstrcts]

Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly engine based on marching cubes.

[SkeuomorphicBee]

Minecraft is just pixels in space. The world is built with a sort of very low resolution voxels. Yes, the 1m x 1m blocks that make up everything are voxels, they only have position (discrete, aligned to the 3D voxel grid) and "colour" (the type/material), and don't have dimensions nor rotation. That is prety much the textbook definition of a voxel. The fact that when rendered they are given texture is a rendering detail that doesn't erase the fact they are voxels.

[badpun]

If you want to use rasterization part of your GPU, you're going to have to eventually convert the voxel data into triangles.

[bun_terminator]

Minecraft is just polygons sure, but it has a "voxely" look, that's what I was getting at.

[paholg]

I think voxel has grown to have two meanings. One is as you describe, another is systems like Minecraft.

[broast]

As an example, a more modern and higher resolution implementation of this style can be seen in "Teardown"

[rzzzt]

I'm also thinking Novalogic games and Voxlap: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm

[paulddraper]

If you're familiar with pixels, you might be familiar with "pixel art", even though you every image on a screen has pixels

[Jasper_]

Huh? What about it uses marching cubes?