Voxel Engines

First off, a Voxel Engine is a game engine that uses voxels, and voxels are simply 3d pixels. One of the most popular games that runs on a voxel engine is Minecraft.

A landscape from Minecraft

If you don't know, (how could you not know?!), Minecraft uses massive blocks (voxels) to form a highly sandboxed universe where players work together to build their own virtual worlds. To me, Minecraft seems to be just a demonstration of the incredible potential behind voxel-based sandbox games. I was enthralled in the game throughout high school. It was another world. A world where I was completely free to build whatever wherever and with whoever. I met people from all over the world and worked together to create complicated logistics systems and redstone circuitry, as well as beautiful mansions and cabins. All this, with voxels that are actually half the height of the characters!

Nowadays, voxel engines are getting much more complex and much more refined. These engines are able to achieve much more complicated worlds with more optimized algorithms written in higher performing programming languages than Java, which is the language Minecraft is written in. I believe that if voxel engines can continue to get more and more powerful, while remaining entirely customizable and modular, that they could soon become the future of virtual reality and video gaming in general.

A landscape from Voxel Farm

I recently stumbled upon the incredibly impressive voxel engine called Voxel Farm. Voxel Farm is written in C and C++ and is a highly advanced engine that allows relatively intuitive world building in a much more continuous sandbox world than Minecraft. As you can see from the image on the left, Voxel Farm looks just like a typical gaming engine. In many ways, Voxel Farm is a typical gaming engine. For example, it can output meshes in real time and work in tangent with many popular game engines like Unity or Cryengine, however in its backend, it is still a fully voxelized world.

Voxel Farm is being developed as a game engine and not as a game. While this is an obvious point, it definitely makes a huge difference. The developers are targeting other developers with much of their programming time, which will have some interesting effects. Now, I'm sure you might say, well how come someone couldn't simply use this game engine to build the next Minecraft? While I agree that this is a distinct possibility, it simply doesn't offer the huge potential that you get when you are in control of absolutely everything about a game. It is a freedom that cannot be matched, and it is one of the main reasons why Minecraft was such a success. Also, it is worth mentioning that the Pro package distributes the full source code to the buyer, so it is technically possible to change the inner workings of the game engine, however I have doubts that even this will be enough.

Despite my doubts, I really hope we get to see some great games come out of this project. And either way, I think the work that is being put into Voxel Farm is an excellent investment. It is pushing the limits of what voxels are capable of, and because of this, I believe it has some incredible potential! So look out for the future of Voxel Farm because it could be making some waves in the world of gaming in the next couple years.