By Jim Rossignol on April 21st, 2011 at 8:14 am.
…which is a videogame news headline if ever I wrote one. It’s also perfectly descriptive of what I am about to talk about, which is the footage posted below. It shows both the editor for Lexaloffle‘s voxel-powered arena-shooter, used for editing things, as well as the sword, which is used for swording stuff. I’ve posted the previous more general action trailer, too, so you can recall the correct category of awesome for this upcoming piece of cleverness.
The game should be out later this year.
21/04/2011 at 08:26 Vague-rant says:
If the same people making X4 made this, I would like to think they’d call it voXplosion.
This years actually looking really good for games; both indie and bigger games look really interesting. Hope this doesn’t get forgotten (although I do wonder why the draw distance is so measly).
21/04/2011 at 08:35 Anthile says:
Voxels are the new portals.
21/04/2011 at 17:49 BAReFOOt says:
Didn’t we move on from single sample (pixel/voxel/whatever) editing, I don’t know, decades ago?
I mean I remember that they still did it in Terminator 2.
But come on, give us real-time destructible NURBS or at least cubes/tetrahedrons with a smoothing algorithm.
21/04/2011 at 08:35 Squishpoke says:
Color me impressed. The only knock I have against it is the weird border thing. It’s not natural, I tell you. Even if you can rationalize it away by saying that my monitor does the same thing.
21/04/2011 at 17:52 BAReFOOt says:
Well, your display can be seen as a window to an infinite world. This here can’t. I hope they can simply make the area bigger, add some distance fog and let the screen clip it. (Or make it look like the screen clips it, after it’s invisibly clipped outside screen borders for efficiency reasons.)
21/04/2011 at 08:47 stahlwerk says:
This looks incredibly charming, especially the explosions :D. And I like the inset of the drawing volume, it reminds me a lot of populous. Probably has some technical reasons behind it that I don’t want to think about right now.
21/04/2011 at 09:40 ross_angus says:
The draw distance reminds me of Virus, on the Amiga.
21/04/2011 at 11:44 Jonathan says:
@ ross_angus
That’s almost exactly what I said about it when I first saw the trailer!
Great minds, etc.
21/04/2011 at 09:02 Hellraiserzlo says:
It looks like a more actiony version of a zelda-like-game that came out on the 360 live, and unlike mincrafts shit art it actually looks like pixel art, so it looks interesting.
The black fov sucks though, this is not a silent hill game and by the looks of it it adds nothing to the game.
21/04/2011 at 16:28 PleasingFungus says:
“3D Dot Game Heroes”, for reference.
21/04/2011 at 09:33 KaL_YoshiKa says:
Please please please have an option to have exploded enemies stay on screen – at least partially.
21/04/2011 at 11:01 Teddy Leach says:
I agree. Not enough games feature persistent corpses. And few of the ones that do feature persistent damage from your weapons. The bodies just seem to heal their wounds like undead Wolverines.
21/04/2011 at 12:08 LionsPhil says:
It apparently looks too messy.
21/04/2011 at 09:44 mod the world says:
Will this be released on android smartphones?
21/04/2011 at 10:21 Teddy Leach says:
Voxel Music Man was ready.
21/04/2011 at 23:49 Voxel_Music_Man says:
No I wozn’t!
21/04/2011 at 10:38 GoodPatton says:
Thank you RPS, I was thinking of this game the other day and wondering if I had missed it somehow, I couldn’t remember the name of it, only it pungent awesomeness.
Excitement renewed!
21/04/2011 at 10:41 Gassalasca says:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWNjHkGO6R4&feature=related
21/04/2011 at 11:28 adonf says:
I’d listen to that music all day!
21/04/2011 at 16:52 shoptroll says:
Me too! Hoping they put the soundtrack out for download :)
21/04/2011 at 11:45 terry says:
This looks pretty adorable, but I’d prefer a voxel citybuilder :-)
21/04/2011 at 13:00 gorgol says:
The engine looks great. But the game format they chose to display it isn’t very interesting.
21/04/2011 at 13:08 Nighthood says:
What with this and Ace of Spades, are we seeing a Voxel resurgance? I’d love it if we were, as with a lot of money pumped into research, voxel engines could produce impressive results.
21/04/2011 at 16:48 LionsPhil says:
From what I could glean from the blog, it’s not actually entirely voxel rendering; it’s turning them into conventional polygon geometry to render them.
I don’t know of anything working on straight-up pure-voxel rendering other than Ken Silverman’s Voxlap (used in Ace of Spades) which is, uh…very classic hacker code, to say the least. Lots of completely undocumented clever tricks.
21/04/2011 at 13:09 Batolemaeus says:
After this headline, can you even continue writing headlines anymore, knowing that no matter what, you will never, ever come close to this again?
21/04/2011 at 16:26 mwoody says:
Looks a lot like 3D Dot Game Heroes, a very similar concept for consoles. I hope they do more with the voxels here, though, because that game ended up playing like a straight Zelda ripoff with little innovation and virtually nothing interesting done with the engine itself.
21/04/2011 at 16:58 Urthman says:
The exciting thing is that someday computers will be able to make worlds out of voxels that look as much better than this as Crisis looks better than an Atari 2600 game. I hope.
22/04/2011 at 00:20 math0ne says:
That’s one sexy voxel drawing interface. Made me go look if there’s anything out there like that already and I found this Paint3D program:
http://www.paint3d.net/
Clunky interface but same idea.
22/04/2011 at 18:47 godwin says:
I’m sold. And man, that first trailer brought back memories of building voxels for Tiberian Sun mods.