Ken Silverman's Voxlap Page

2004: Voxlap library released. (A subset of the 2005 Voxlap source code release)

2003 screenshots and first demo executable!

2002 screenshots of an unreleased Voxlap prototype game

When I graduated college in May, 2000, I started working on a new voxel engine called "Voxlap". (For those newbies out there, the word "voxel" is derived from "volume + pixel". It's like a 2D pixel, but in 3D - just a fancy name for a cube.) Most game engines these days use polygons. Polygons and voxels each have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, it's a lot easier to destroy a wall in a voxel engine. Also, there's no penalty for drawing curved surfaces over flat surfaces in a voxel engine.

I must say though, that polygons do have one really big (and unfair) advantage - all the 3D accelerators support them, and this makes them quite hard to compete with. It takes a strong will (and perhaps a guy with nothing better to do) to continue, but someday, voxels will rule the world! (I hope)

In June 2001, Tom Dobrowolski joined my "team" as a programmer. He's currently a student in Poland and he's been writing the game code for my voxlap engine demo in his spare time. He's a talented guy and it's great having him working with me on this project. Tom has his own website - he's got old demos and screenshots of his own there.

Here are the features that Voxlap currently supports:

6 Degrees of Freedom (move anywhere, look anywhere)
Room over room built-in, no hacks necessary
Accurate intersections so voxels look like perfect cubes up close
Fast CSG operations for: boxes, spheres, ellipsoids, cylinders, sectors, and 3D convex hulls
Voxel sprites with full matrix rotation (using .KV6 output format from SLAB6)
Support for sprite bending or twisting (great for animation such as a fish swimming)
Full-screen Z-buffer for bug-free clipping of sprites
Fog of any depth or color.
Mip-mapping for both world and sprites.
Support for Mercator-projection panoramas and converter for cubic panoramas (see KUBE / KUBEGL)
Smooth collision detection and sliding
Real-time WYSIWYG editor
Real-time lighting function
Support for procedural textures (wood, etc...)
Includes all basic functions necessary for a game - including my own sample game code
Automatically detects floating objects and makes them fall
1024x1024x256 board map (this is plenty big if you take advantage of the depth)
My own optimized decompression library for PNG, JPG, GIF, TGA, BMP and ZIP files.
Everything in pure 32-bit color (with emulation for 24,16,15,8 bit color)
Uses modern compiler & OS: MS Visual C++ 6.0, Masm 6.15, Win95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput fully supported
Optimized assembly code, supporting SSE (Pentium III) or 3DNow! (Athlon) instructions
Doesn't require a 3D accelerator :)

08/15/2006: Peter Houska has been doing experiments with voxels lately. Many of his demos support my own data formats from Voxlap, Groudraw, and Slab6. If you're a fan of voxels, you should check out his work.

Here's a collection of 7 more heightmap voxel demos, showing how I progressed from my first demo (April 1993) to some more advanced ones that lead up to Voxlap. Also included is a specially designed heightmap terrain generator from Tom Dobrowolski. Full source code included.

GROUDRAW.ZIP (535,022 bytes, 03/11/2006) (DOS32 mostly/OpenWatcom 1.3)

Here's an early voxel demo of mine that I wrote in April, 1994. It features ceilings and floors, depth shading, and some primitive modification to the cave. Includes source code.

CAVE.ZIP (46,975 bytes, 05/29/2005) (DOS32)

Cave.exe screen shot

Want to make your own voxel engine, but don't know how to get started? Take a look at this little snippet of Qbasic code. It's slow in Qbasic, but if you port it to C, then it'll run MUCH faster. (Sorry, my voxlap algorithm is way too complex to explain here!)

GROUFST2.BAS (1,903 bytes) (DOS)

Groufst2.bas screen shot

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