HELLO...hello...hello... ECHO!...echo!...echo...
...such a lonely place.
...place...
...place...
4 comments
A little bigger this time...
Second try at uploading because the last one did not show up in the BBS list...and I like seeing it there!
Voxatron: Implications
Voxatron is an incredibly unique game. It opens the door to wide new vistas of creative exploration, and in a way that will be intuitive and community driven. However, the potential of this game, only in its infancy, extends far beyond itself, or so I think it very well may. It is, really for the first time, introducing truly volumetric gameplay, something that is today only possible with voxel data structures. While games like Minecraft were certainly volumetric, what I am getting at requires a high enough resolution to really give some 'meat' to in-game objects.
In most games one may find stunningly rendered cars, but of course these cars have no real engines. In-game characters or other players have no internal organs. Cities have no sewers, and the materials used to make these worlds aren't really materials at all, and lack characteristic behaviors. Volumetric gameplay is meaty gameplay, providing a satisfaction which I have only seen the games Voxatron and Cell: Emergence attempt to capitalize on so far. When there arise games involving dynamic in-game simulations, CA, etc, I think volumetric gameplay will really take off, and here we are seeing one of the first attempts at what may spark a new genre in voxel-based gameplay.
However, there is something particularly fun about all this for all you lovers of retro. Recall that at the dawn of the retro-age there wasn't, obviously, any stylistic appreciation for the look of pixelation. So then why did the mainstream put up with it? We'd had photorealistic films for many decades by then, so what was it about games that drew us, despite their inability to accurately portray the worlds wherein which their stories took place? The word is interactivity. It offered a radically new experience to us, so that representing an italian plumber as a combination of red and green in an area exceeding a range of no more than 16x16 pixels was acceptable. This experience so outweighed asthetic importance that such simplistic presentations entered immediately into the mainstream and exerted a defining cultural force on a generation.
Likewise, there is room once again for such simplicity. Just as we moved from the passive act of film to the interactive act of gaming, a new experience is coming that will outweigh the importance of many of the most important design features of many mainstream games, including photorealism. That experience is the volumetric experience. It is the experience had in knowing the world you are engaging is not a facade, but a complex, reactive and volumetric simulation. In a way, a legitimate computational reality, where the explorative possibilites are neither predetermined nor determinable. Truly creative exploration of the impact of volumetric interactivity on the gaming experience may lead to a mainstream revisitation of the retro-experience, though such a period will likely be a short one.
As computational power increases, voxels or some equivilent will increase in resolution and all games will become volumetric. Even in the development of a title for the My Little Pony franchise, to ask what the neccesity of volumetric rendering and the ability to have dynamic interaction with a complex simulated world in such a game could serve would be like asking why a game of the same type today neccesitates 3-D textured graphics and proper lighting effects. It will simply be a matter of realism; no longer a novelty. Volumetrism (just coined) will become a standard design feature of any game experience.
But there is at least a brief period coming, I suspect, where the retro style will be ressurected, not merely as the result of a more or less stylistic design decision, but as a neccesary compromise to enable the development of highly interactive, volumetric game worlds in a cost-effective way, and in a way which modern machines can handle well.
Demonstration of modular approach to vehicle animation using only two clips and allowing arbitrary speeds and distances to be covered. Modularity will, naturally, be essential to large scale, dynamic voxel scenes. From this demonstration you can also see how cars will turn corners, requiring at most two more clips. Different rates can be applied to different vehicle model animations to coordinate ones less common than others (i.e. bikes, taxis, etc.). It will be exciting to see how modularity is used to make quick work of large projects while retaining quality and interest.
Roaches make great waves!
Is it the case that there is significantly low support for the game, and is this why I always see the same 618 levels in the BBS list, or is that because there was only one chance to have user levels uploaded? If there is a support/activity problem, what can be done to help that?
