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.
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).
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Voxels are the new portals.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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The draw distance reminds me of Virus, on the Amiga.
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@ ross_angus
That’s almost exactly what I said about it when I first saw the trailer!
Great minds, etc.
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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.
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“3D Dot Game Heroes”, for reference.
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Please please please have an option to have exploded enemies stay on screen – at least partially.
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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.
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It apparently looks too messy.
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Will this be released on android smartphones?
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Voxel Music Man was ready.
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No I wozn’t!
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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!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWNjHkGO6R4&feature=related
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I’d listen to that music all day!
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Me too! Hoping they put the soundtrack out for download :)
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This looks pretty adorable, but I’d prefer a voxel citybuilder :-)
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The engine looks great. But the game format they chose to display it isn’t very interesting.
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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.
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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.
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After this headline, can you even continue writing headlines anymore, knowing that no matter what, you will never, ever come close to this again?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m sold. And man, that first trailer brought back memories of building voxels for Tiberian Sun mods.
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